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.