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