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