The East Timor talks at the UN

The East Timor talks at the UN

The ninth round of talks are taking place at the United
Nations headquarters in New York to resolve the East Timor
problem. In our observation, the dialog has been given greater
weight because of the fact that -- unlike Boutros Ghali before
him -- (UN Secretary-General) Kofi Annan has been more willing to
involve himself personally in the effort. Before this, the dialog
had to take place on a bilateral forum, albeit under a UN
umbrella and using UN facilities. We hope that with the
secretary-general now willing to assume a more active personal
role, the East Timor issue can be resolved more expeditiously.

Portugal's weak position in its talks with Indonesia,
meanwhile, has been elevated a little by the emergence of human
rights issues involving East Timor. These human rights issues are
blown out of proportion and exploited by Portugal to discredit
Indonesia in the eyes of the international community and to
question Indonesia's sovereignty over East Timor. This
exploitation of human rights issues by Portugal has hampered
Indonesia's efforts abroad to try to find a solution for the East
Timor problem.

We must be careful not to fall into this trap by constantly
trying to isolate those human rights issues from the political
status of East Timor, which is already an integral part of
Indonesia. We must also be consistent in our effort to keep our
official dialog with Portugal on the UN forum, as is the case
with the present tripartite talks.

In addition -- and there is no escaping this reality -- we
need to be more active in developing our diplomatic lobbies in
order to rally the support of other countries and to make certain
that we will be the winner in the case that the issue is once
again subjected to voting at the UN.

-- Surabaya Post