Horta and the Nobel Prize

Horta and the Nobel Prize

There seems to have been some arbitrary editing decisions made
by The Jakarta Post in my Oct. 22, 1996 letter on Jose Ramos
Horta and the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, it is any newspaper's
prerogative to edit letters, but allow me to make the following
comments.

When I mentioned the organization named Tapol, I did not mean
"political detainees," as your paper added in parentheses. What I
meant was the UK-based group led by Carmel Budiardjo, a British
woman of certain political leanings who married an Indonesian
formerly assigned by our government overseas. Tapol puts out a
regular bulletin devoted to depicting Indonesia as a totally
bleak country full of barbed wire and where there seems to be no
such thing as normal daily life. I am sure the Nobel Committee
relied heavily on and was influenced by Tapol's reporting on this
country.

Other minor changes made to my letter were the deletion of
some words I wrote regarding the particular set of circumstances
prevailing in Indonesia during the 1965-1975 period of our
history, and conversely, the addition of an indefinite article in
the paragraph about the Nobel Prize never being awarded to
Mahatma Gandhi.

There are postscripts to my previous letter: Newsweek magazine
misspelled the word "Fretilin," not once but twice in their
recent interview with Jose Ramos Horta. A sign of ignorance and
naivete about East Timor on that U.S. publication's part? Time
magazine described him as "a native East Timorese". Perhaps that
version of English known as "Timespeak" has new definitions, but
Ramos Horta's father was Portuguese.

For the sake of their articles, magazines sometimes don't
mention certain facts. The young Ramos Horta was in Mozambique
during 1970-1972, where he almost certainly linked up with the
Marxist Frelimo organization, after which the East Timorese
Fretilin was patterned.

"Peace" movements attract people because of their stated aims,
but all too often in the past, they have been preempted by a
certain fringe of the political spectrum. The ever-changing Ramos
Horta is probably to East Timor what Daniel Ortega is to
Nicaragua.

FARID BASKORO

Jakarta