RI confused over Nobel choices

RI confused over Nobel choices

By Dino Patti Djalal

LONDON (JP): On Dec. 10 in snowy Oslo, Norway, the Nobel Peace
Prize will go to two men who have been involved in the events of
East Timor: Bishop Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos Horta.

The Nobel Committee got it half right. Bishop Belo is widely
recognized as a significant force in reconciliation -- a process
we all want to see develop. He is also an accepted figure among
East Timorese of different political persuasions.

But most Indonesians find it perplexing that the Nobel
Committee paired these two opposite personalities for such a
prestigious prize. Indeed, their apparent confusion over the
history of East Timor may, in the long run, cause more harm than
good.

There are several reasons why Indonesians feel bewildered that
this year's Nobel Peace Prize is being shared by Jose Ramos
Horta.

The first reason is that they see Ramos Horta's passionate
call for referendum, democracy and human rights as being
inconsistent with his past, for these were precisely things that
were associated with the brief rule of Fretilin in 1975. On Nov.
28, 1975, Ramos Horta and his gun-totting Fretilin colleagues
unilaterally declared East Timor's "independence" and formed the
so-called Democratic Republic of East Timor. Apparently, Ramos
Horta and the elite members of the Fretilin central committee
thought they had the exclusive right, more so than the people of
East Timor, to determine what was to become of East Timor. They
did not bother to wait for a referendum or elections, nor did
they make the slightest effort to verify whether this was what
the East Timorese wanted. East Timorese of other political
persuasions -- Apodeti (Popular Democratic Association of
Timorese) and the Timorese Democratic Union -- surely wanted
different things. But Fretilin, blinded by power, offered them
not a ballot box but blazing guns: thousands of East Timorese,
including Apodeti and Timorese Democratic Union members, were
massacred as Fretilin forces waged a campaign of terror against
their political opponents. Given this, is it any wonder that
whatever Ramos Horta has to say today about democracy, human
rights and referendum is dismissed by his East Timorese political
opponents as hypocrisy?

Ramos Horta now claims he was away during the civil war. It is
true he spent a few weeks in Australia (mostly in Darwin) during
the few months of Fretilin rule, but the fact is that for much of
the time (until he left for good on Dec. 4, 1975) he was in East
Timor: he knew of the atrocities, and he was very much in command
of Fretilin. In fact, in many of his speaking tours throughout
that period, he continued to praise and justify Fretilin
policies.

As a key leader of Fretilin at the time, Horta is morally and
politically responsible for Fretilin's brutal policies. Until
now, 20 years after the Fretilin massacres, Horta has not
apologized or expressed regret over these atrocities.

Indonesians also feel the Nobel Committee was seriously
misinformed when it praised Horta's "significant contribution
through the reconciliation talks". For the sheer irony is that
the concept of "reconciliation" was not known as Horta's
intellectual brainchild or political trademark.

The reconciliation process was initiated in early 1993 by two
East Timorese, former Fretilin president Dr. Abilio Araujo and
Indonesian ambassador Lopes da Cruz. They both gathered scores of
East Timorese who once sought their mutual annihilation (during
the 1975 civil war) and who they have not met since. These East
Timorese -- coming from East Timor, Jakarta, Portugal, Macao and
Australia -- met twice in the UK: first in December 1993 and
later in October 1994. Ramos Horta was never part of these
meetings. In fact, to the dismay of the reconciliation group,
Horta opposed this process and repeatedly besmirched their effort
to reconcile, calling it "a gimmick" and "a farce".

In 1995, the UN took over the idea and launched the All East
Timorese Dialogue (AIETD), which Horta and his group joined. The
reconciliation group at first tried to mold the AIETD into an
extension of their London-based reconciliation talks. Horta
flatly rejected this idea. The reconciliation group insisted the
AIETD be conceived as an event for reconciliation. This was also
opposed by Horta.

Hence, the East Timorese from the reconciliation group
rightfully feel stunned that credit for their most prized effort
should be given away freely by the Nobel Committee to the very
man who has opposed reconciliation every step of the way. The
fact that the Nobel Committee referred to the AIETD as
"reconciliation talks" (which is definitely not the way Horta
sees it) while praising Ramos Horta's "significant contribution"
to this process, does raise questions of the extent to which the
Nobel Committee has misunderstood the whole picture. Dr. Abilio
Araujo, the co-promoter of reconciliation, stated that the Nobel
Committee "committed an error" in inviting Horta to share the
Nobel prize with Bishop Belo, and stated that "far from deepening
dialog, (the Nobel prize to Horta) will contribute to the
polarization of the Timorese leaders and open up old wounds that
we all had thought healed".

Indonesians also question what the Nobel Committee describes
as Ramos Horta's "significant contribution" through "his peace
plan for the region". The East Timor conflict is 20 years old,
and there have been plenty of proposed schemes from many quarters
for a political solution. Horta too has come up with a "peace
plan". This, however, is not the same as having "contributed to
peace" in a politically tangible way.

For comparison's sake, take Richard Holbrooke, one of this
year's candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. Holbrooke worked out
an imaginative peace plan for Bosnia which finally met the hard-
won consent of the warring parties, and ended one of the most
violent human catastrophes in recent years. In contrast, Horta's
"peace plan" has not been supported by any government or the UN,
and no East Timorese political groups outside his faction have
endorsed it. Horta's "peace plan" is also not on the agenda of
the tripartite negotiations between Indonesia and Portugal under
the auspices of the UN Security Council, which is internationally
recognized as the sole forum to settle the East Timor question.
As things stand, it is extremely unlikely that Indonesia would
succumb to Horta's long-standing demand that he be included in
the formal negotiations between Indonesia and Portugal, nor is it
conceivable that Indonesia would be receptive to Ramos Horta's
"peace plan". To think, for instance, that Indonesia would ever
accept Horta's "plan" for the installment of UN administration in
East Timor (similar to what United Nations Transitional Authority
in Cambodia did) and agree to eject the current provincial
government and regional House of Representatives is, to put it
mildly, quite unrealistic.

Will the Nobel prize contribute to the resolution of the
conflict, as the Nobel Committee hoped?

The Nobel event will likely stimulate an aggressive publicity
offensive against Indonesia on the East Timor issue, and Ramos
Horta, with his Nobel badge, will be at the center of it.

But no amount of publicity will solve the East Timor question.
The New Order diplomatic history shows that conflicts are best
dealt with by cool heads who incrementally develop confidence and
common understanding on the basis of mutual commitment to working
out a rational solution. There is the worrying possibility that
the Nobel event might switch the mode of dialog from solution
finding to a propaganda war. In the process, confidence will be
battered, confrontation intensified and positions harden. At the
end of the day, the East Timor issue will see a thousand
headlines but not an inch of substantive progress.

Francis Sejersted, the Nobel Committee's chairman, is right in
pointing out that East Timor should not be "a forgotten
conflict". Now, the more important question is whether all of us
can remember it properly.

The writer is an Indonesian diplomat currently based in
London. The views expressed here are strictly personal.