Jakarta – Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas said Wednesday that Indonesia stood firm in barring the return of self-exiled resistance activist Jose Ramos Horta to East Timor, and warned him against trying to enter the territory illegally.
"The Indonesian government will not give a visa to Ramos Horta," Alatas told journalists before attending a cabinet meeting at the Bina Graha presidential office. "If he tries to come in, he must take full responsibility for the consequences," Alatas warned.
Ramos Horta, who won the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize with the Bishop of Dili, Carlos Ximenes Felipe Belo, said last week that regardless of Jakarta's stand, he will return in July to campaign for independence ahead of a UN vote on the future of East Timor.
Alatas' comment came a day after a US diplomat here said Washington supported Ramos Horta's demands to be allowed back to the territory to campaign before its people vote in August for either independence or autonomy.
The Indonesian minister said that an agreement on the ballot reached between Indonesia and Portugal at the United Nations in New York in May specifically said the UN would consult East Timorese in the territory, in other regions in Indonesia or in exile abroad. "This was the agreement," Alatas said.
Western diplomats whose countries are sending volunteers to the UN force which will oversee the vote, told AFP here that there was no clause in the UN agreement preventing the return of exiled East Timorese.
On Tuesday a US diplomat here said that: "The US supports the right of Ramos Horta and other East Timorese to return to East Timor to campaign on behalf of their views.
"If resistance leader Xanana Gusmao, now under house arrest in Jakarta, chooses to participate in the campaign, we also support his right to do so," the diplomat told AFP.
Meanwhile, the state Antara news agency reported from Lisbon that the former president of East Timor's Fretilin pro-independence movement, Abilio Araujo, who now favors autonomy, will visit Indonesia.
Araujo has headed a splinter faction of the Fretilin which had consented to meet pro-Indonesian East Timorese under a Jakarta-brokered "reconciliation dialogue" since 1993.
"My visit to Indonesia is in the interest of a popular consultation in accordance with the procedure already agreed upon in the latest tripartite meeting," Araujo was quoted by Antara as saying before leaving for Indonesia.
"I would like to proceed with the process of reconciliation among East Timorese and at the same time discuss the best future for the East Timorese," he said.
Araujo, who now chairs the Timorese Third Way Movement (TTWM), said the autonomy package implied "independence plus" to the East Timorese. He said the East Timorese people must be aware of the "adverse consequences" that the independence option carried.
"What East Timor needs is not its own independence, but rather an opportunity to correctly develop its own potential," he said.
The population of the former Portuguese colony are to take part in a UN-supervised vote on whether they want autonomy under Indonesia or to move towards independence.
Violence between the two camps has escalated since Jakarta announced in January that it may let go of East Timor if the autonomy deal was rejected.