On the Nobel Prize

On the Nobel Prize

I wish to comment on the recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1996 to Jose Ramos-Horta, the former chief of foreign affairs and information for East Timor's Fretilin movement. As we all should know, the leftwing Fretilin was one of several East Timorese factions engaged in, and on the verge of winning a civil war in 1975, when Indonesian troops moved in.

In Southeast Asia at that time, for those who have forgotten, people still remembered the abortive 1965 communist coup attempt here; South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were under the former Soviet sphere of influence; and East Timor's Fretilin was left with the most arms by the departing Portuguese in their clumsy "decolonization process." History will record that it was the height of the Cold War, and forces of the extreme left were on the march worldwide.

In sections of the western press nowadays, it is fashionable to deride the Indonesian view that Ramos-Horta is a political opportunist. It is often stated that Ramos-Horta has jettisoned his left wing views, but would that have been the case if the Soviet empire had not collapsed and there was an East Timor that was separate from Indonesia? Did Ramos-Horta have a reason for abandoning his political beliefs other than trying to gain international support when hard-line socialism fell out of favor?

To ask some other questions: Did the Nobel Peace Prize Committee -- a group of ivory tower academics in a faraway Nordic country -- ever rely on truly objective reports about Indonesia and East Timor? Have they ever set foot in Indonesia? Or did they base their judgment on information from organizations such as Tapol (political detainees) and Ramos-Horta's backers -- who concentrate solely on the negative side of Indonesia's administration of the province?

For those overawed by the Nobel Peace Prize judges: remember they failed miserably to award this an honor to the late Mahatma Gandhi -one of the greatest apostles of peace this century.

Finally, can Mr. Francis Sejersted, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, say in front of a TV camera that he truly believes that Fretilin activist Jose Ramos-Horta is of the same caliber as Mahatma Gandhi -- or for that matter other Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Mother Theresa, Woodrow Wilson, and Martin Luther King, Jr?

FARID BASKORO

Jakarta