PEACE-MAKER
Timor Leste President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta arrived in Manila two days ago for a state visit. He met with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Malacañang, where they discussed educational, technical, economic, and political cooperation between our two countries.
Ramos-Horta, a friend of the Filipino people, was his country’s president in 2012 when we visited the capital, Dili, to address an international conference on promoting peace and reconciliation in Asia.
The nation had just finished its presidential elections then and we could still feel the tense political atmosphere.
The global forum in Dili, which was jointly sponsored by the government of Timor Leste, International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP), Centrist Asia Pacific Democrats International (CAPDI), and the International Ecological Safety Collaborative Organization (IESCO), honored the Timor Leste model of peace and reconciliation as examples for the world and paid tribute to the Timorese people whose indomitable spirit surmounted decades of armed conflict and atrocities during their long drawn-out battle for freedom and independence from the Portuguese colonial rule and then the Indonesian occupation.
The delegates were moved deeply by the Timorese delegation’s recollection of their people’s struggle for self-determination, culminating in 1999 when Indonesia agreed to hold an UN-sponsored referendum to decide on Timor-Leste’s independence. During the voting on Aug. 30, 1999, 78.5 percent of the voters chose independence. In 2002, Timor-Leste became independent.
The Timorese journey toward independence was also recognized in the awarding of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize to Roman Catholic bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Ramos-Horta “for their work toward a just and peaceful solution.”
During our conversations in his simple home in Dili, Ramos-Horta, the nationalist hero, recalled the many years of suffering and bloodshed that the Timorese people went through during their long, uphill struggle for self-determination.
He, however, ascribed the good present-day relationship between Dili and Jakarta to the fact that neither side allowed past grievances to come between them despite brutalities by some in the Indonesian military and by Indonesian vigilantes who sought to prevent East Timor’s independence.
We are proud that Filipino religious missionaries, peacekeepers, and social workers attended to the needs of the Timorese people during their years of bloody struggle for independence. These Filipinos risked their own safety and well-being in the service of the troubled Timorese people.
Ramos-Horta was Timor-Leste’s president from 2007 to 2012 and previously served as prime minister and foreign minister at the age of 25.
He had visited our country on numerous occasions, as a fighter for Timorese people’s freedom and independence and then as president of a free and independent nation.
In 2008, a few months before his state visit to the Philippines, he was ambushed by rebel soldiers, which almost killed him. When he recovered, he resumed his state visit to our country. Ramos-Horta worked hard to forge deeper relations between our countries and peoples.
It is interesting to note that when Ramos-Horta was still recovering from serious injuries from the assassination attempt, a Filipina served as interim first lady of Timor Leste from February 2008 to April 2008. This was because her husband, then national assembly president Fernando de Araujo, served as acting president.
The Filipina is Jacqueline Siapno, a Dagupan-born Filipino-American political economist, academic, and writer.
We are pleased to have joined Ramos-Horta and his comrade and fellow hero in Timor Leste’s battle for independence, current Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, in contributing our share, even in a small way, in advancing the causes of peace and reconciliation in Asia and the international community through the Bangkok-based Asian Peace and Reconciliation Council (APRC), of which we are all members of the executive council.
Gusmao became the first president of an independent Timor Leste from 2002 to 2007 and as prime minister from 2007 to 2015.