Seven Questions: José Ramos-Horta

East Timor's Nobel Prize-winning president asks, just who is the failed state here?

BY SIMON ROUGHNEEN | JULY 9, 2009

A year after surviving an assassination attempt, President José Ramos-Horta is feeling good about his country. Peace seems to have taken hold in East Timor, where U.N. peacekeepers have been based almost continuously since 1999. The economy is bucking trends in the region with a 12 percent growth rate last year. And Aug. 30 marks the 10-year anniversary of the vote for independence from Indonesia. For Ramos-Horta, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his nonviolent work toward independence and was elected president in 2007, things could hardly look better.

Proud of recent success and touting plans for more, Ramos-Horta spoke to Foreign Policy from his new Chinese-built presidential compound in Dili, East Timor's capital. He criticizes the West's misunderstandings about his country and discusses the progress it has made in recent years. Despite challenges ahead -- from security reform to corruption to widespread poverty -- Ramos-Horta says that the United States is closer to being a "failing state" than the country he leads. Excerpts:

Foreign Policy: The United Nations decided in February to extend the mandate of its peacekeeping force for another year. How is security-sector reform in East Timor progressing? Are the East Timorese police ready to resume full responsibilities from the United Nations?

José Ramos-Horta: I am confident that the PNTL [National Police of East Timor] can assume full responsibilities. I prefer that the handover be at a prudent pace alongside continued training and institutional reform. I would like the U.N. police to give backup until 2012, and I know there is political will among contributing countries for this.

I see a two-to-three-year horizon before we have progressed enough in redeveloping our defense forces. The Army has recruited new soldiers to fill projected numbers. In the next two years we face a generation[al] change, as resistance veterans retire after serving this country for 30 years.

FP: Many of the personnel involved in the 2006 East Timor crisis have retained senior positions in the security forces. Are elites exempt from justice? How will this affect people's confidence in the country's institutions?

JRH: Some American and European "geniuses," who write in newspapers and so-called academic journals, have labeled ours as a failed state. Well, I can only cite another American institution, the International Republican Institute, which did a two-month survey in late 2008 and reached the following conclusions: Confidence in the president is 83 percent, confidence in the police is 82 percent, confidence in the prime minister, I think, is 79 percent, and more than 60 percent had confidence in how the country is being run.

Some of these pseudo intellectuals in the United States seem to forget that Timor-Leste [East Timor], along with China, is the one financing U.S. debt. So who is the failing state -- the United States or Timor-Leste?

MARIO JONNY DOS SANTOS/AFP/Getty Images

 

José Ramos-Horta is president of Timor-Leste and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996. Simon Roughneen is an Irish journalist covering Southeast Asia.

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GIORGIO

5:47 AM ET

July 15, 2009

Sounds like a populist...

...Always speaking in bombastic superlatives "Indonesia and Timor Leste have the best bilateral relations in the world", "There is no one more caring and honest than my Prime Minister"

...Calling academics and commentators critical of him "pseudo-intellectuals" writing for "so-called academic journals" is always the hallmark of a demagogue in the making. Trying to deride erudition and intelligence is populism 101.

...Making fantastical statements like comparing Timor-Leste, with a GDP per capita comparable to India, about 50% of people below the poverty line, and a precarious security situation to the United States and saying that Timor-Leste is "failing less" than the US.

I expect him to attempt constitutional changes to let himself stay in power for longer than he's meant to in a couple of years at the most. As soon as a real crisis hits the country.