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Timorese Nobel Laureate: “Peacemakers pay a price”

Timor-Leste’s president says he chose “the difficult path” and “the key to end the wars are leaders”

José Ramos-Horta, the president of Asia’s youngest country Timor-Leste, has told 鶹 HARDtalk that “the greatest act of justice is not revenge” but reconciliation. He said that justice came about not through “prosecuting people”, but because “the whole international community, including Indonesia, corrected the wrongs of the past by recognising Timor-Leste’s independence” in 2002.

Speaking to Stephen Sackur, the co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize said he had forgiven every “country in the world that collaborated with the Suharto regime.” Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor lasted from 1975 to 1999 and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, including four of Ramos-Horta’s own siblings. He explained that accountability was not a priority for him, saying “those who didn't commit any crime may cast the first stone”.

President Ramos-Horta, who has travelled around the world trying to broker peace, believes that his approach to conflict resolution has relevance to current wars. He asserted that “the tragic situation in the Middle East” is because “neither side has had a Mahatma Gandhi, or a Mandela”. He added that “for peace to prevail over hatred, over violence, you have to have courageous leaders”. He noted that there had been some in the past, such as Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin, but that “they paid a price”. He went on to cite other victims of assassination such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, noting that “peacemakers pay a price”.

Now serving as Timor-Leste’s president for the second time, Ramos-Horta was a key figure in the country’s liberation struggle. He said that, in choosing reconciliation, the Timorese had opted “for the difficult path”. But he credited the lessons which his movement learned from Nelson Mandela and his push for national reconciliation. For Ramos-Horta, “the key to wars are leaders”, who have the ability to both start and end them.

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