Horta's referendum stand
By Dino Patti Djalal
LONDON (JP): At a recent 10-day seminar series East Timor independence leader Jose Ramos Horta used the occasion to speak on his most favorite subject: East Timor's referendum.
The seminar which covered four North American cities, evolved around a series of points and counterpoints traded between Horta, five pro-integration East Timorese and myself.
The conversation began on Feb. 27 in Boston, Massachussets. Horta was addressing a crowd at Harvard University, where he spoke about East Timor's self-determination and called for a referendum.
The session was going well for Horta, until Domingos Policarpo, an integrationist East Timorese, accused Horta of hypocrisy. Domingos said Fretilin, of which Horta was a key figure, was not the least bit interested in a referendum in 1975. He said Fretilin was the only party which had boycotted all negotiations to implement self-determination.
Of course it was Horta who unilaterally and forcefully declared East Timor's "independence" in November 1975, an act which constituted a flagrant desecration of the right of East Timorese for self-determination.
Horta was boxed in. He responded, quite astoundingly, by declaring opposition to the Fretilin "declaration of independence", stating that it was a deed of his Fretilin colleagues, not his. Horta also said that he wrote about this in his book Funu: The unfinished saga of East Timor (1987), "which I am sure you have read, Mr. Djalal".
I have read Horta's book, and could not believe I had missed this crucial element. That night, I asked a member of staff at the Embassy in London to find the book and scan it to spot any reference to Horta's opposition to the Fretilin "declaration of independence".
Two days later he informed me that Horta made no such reference in his book. In fact, in his book Horta indicated that his main reservation was regarding the date, not principle, of such a declaration, preferring January 1976 instead of November 1975. Horta had managed to deceive us and his audience about the book. But at least now that Horta was reluctantly declaring his opposition to the Fretilin "declaration of independence", the conversation was going somewhere.
The Fretilin "declaration of independence", of course, is completely void of political and diplomatic currency. The declaration was shunned by the international community, including Portugal, Indonesia and the UN. Even scores of former Fretilin leaders, including the first President of the "Fretilin Government", Xavier do Amaral, have repudiated it. Nonetheless, it was necessary to stick to it as a key point of debate to highlight Ramos Horta's self-contradiction on the question of the referendum.
The debate continued in San Francisco. Here, it was my turn to speak from the podium. I said: "The question of the referendum is something Horta and his Fretilin colleagues no longer have a right to profess in 1997, for they were precisely the ones who did everything they could to rob the East Timor people of this God-given right in 1975."
Horta did not stay long enough to hear his East Timorese fellows criticize him. Clementino Amaral, a member of the National Commission on Human Rights, lamented: "I would like to ask the leaders of Fretilin, those like Horta, why they did not hold a referendum when they held power for over 100 days in East Timor?" Domingos, who suffered from Fretilin brutality, claimed that "Horta used the people of East Timor to score political points".
Domingos claims to speak for East Timor but he has never stepped foot in East Timor in 20 years. "You can't speak for those you don't know," said Francisco da Silva, chairman of the Forum for East Timor Studies.
He added: "For Horta to call a referendum, when his party and the Portuguese killed so many East Timorese, is not only irresponsible, it is an insult to the memory of all killed in the civil war."
Horta responded the following day when speaking at the University of Berkeley. But his argument had new elements. His key message was that Fretilin had done nothing wrong by declaring "independence" unilaterally. Yes, he argued, they did it, but so did the Indonesians in 1945, and so did the Americans in 1776. Both the Indonesian and American proclamations of independence were "unilateral acts" and "did not involve any referendum". So why should Fretilin be condemned for doing the same for East Timor? Many in the audience agreed.
Horta was dancing to our tune. But I was not about to let him get away with his false analogy. After his speech, I said that Horta's remarks on Indonesian and American independence only showed how much he misunderstood about the basics of self- determination in East Timor.
Indonesian and American unilateral proclamations of independence were entirely irrelevant to the case of East Timor. First, by 1975, it was clear to all sides -- that there were three equally valid political options for East Timor: integration with Indonesia, a separate East Timor state or an arrangement with Portugal.
Second, it was clear that these three options were to be determined not by the elite members of the Fretilin central committee, but by the people of East Timor. Whatever the circumstances on the ground, Fretilin never had the exclusive right to make that decision for, and impose it upon, the East Timorese, as it did blatantly on Nov. 28, 1975.
Horta then said that Fretilin had to unilaterally declare this "independence" in view of a prospective "Indonesian invasion". But then, oddly enough, he pleaded, "But if we were wrong in 1975 for declaring independence, then let's have another vote, let's have a referendum."
I was not given the chance to refute Horta. But I knew that he was stretching his argument too far. The fact is that when Horta presented his case before the UN Security Council in April 1976, he never justified the declaration as a preemptive measure. Instead, Horta persistently conceived East Timor's self- determination in terms of "the people's armed struggle for national liberation under the leadership of Fretilin".
As he proudly stated to the Security Council: "The people of East Timor, after defeating their internal enemies, proclaimed their independence." In this long speech, he did not utter one word of "referendum".
After two weeks with Horta, my East Timorese colleagues and I agreed that Horta's message was no more than an endless assortment of contradictions:
* Fretilin's unilateral and forceful "declaration of independence" contradicted their commitment to a democratic self- determination by the people;
* Horta's recent opposition to the "declaration of independence" contradicted the fact that he served as a very outspoken Fretilin "foreign minister" who had launched a futile campaign to seek international support for such a declaration;
* Fretilin's "declaration of independence" contradicted Horta's current recognition of Portugal as East Timor's administering power. In fact, it was Horta himself who proclaimed to the UN Security Council on April 12, 1976: "The Central Committee of Fretilin considers as terminated any political ties between East Timor and Portugal", and that he "repudiate any suggestion that Portugal is still the administering power". To add insult to injury, Horta called Portugal "the mysterious administering power of nothing".
* Horta's opposition to the declaration also contradicted the views of some of his Fretilin colleagues in Portugal and the guerrilla factions in East Timor. Indeed, Horta may have some explaining to do.
My last conversation with Horta took place in Vancouver, Canada, on March 7. After making a short speech, Horta opened the floor to questions. I questioned his recent remarks in Boston, and said that after having read his book, I still could not spot the part regarding his opposition to the Fretilin "declaration of independence". I then asked him to show me the page in question, and walked up to him to hand over the book.
Horta was not pleased, and he likened the situation to "Jodie Foster" being followed by "John Hincley", a remark which was picked up by the Canadian media the next day. I was rather surprised that Horta chose to evade the question. Horta did not inspect the book I gave him, and proceeded to answer questions from other people.
When the question period ended, Horta still had not answered my question. The audience was leaving. I approached him for an answer. Horta, knowing that some members of the audience were curiously watching to see if he could show the page, flipped through the book. "It's here somewhere," he said. "I am sure you read it too fast." He stopped at a page, pretending to point to it, and said in a voice only audible only to both of us, "I will show you next time".
It was the end of our conversation. And it was Horta at his best.
The writer is a London-based Indonesian diplomat. The views expressed here are strictly personal.
Window: The Fretilin "declaration of independence", of course, is completely void of political and diplomatic currency. The declaration was shunned by the International community, including Portugal, Indonesia and the UN.