Seven Questions: José Ramos-Horta

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:

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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?

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