War as a means to achieve peace: the world according to Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos-Horta

1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos-Horta has been on the front pages of the news again. Go here and here. President of East Timor, which recently won its independence from Indonesia after 24 years of occupation, he is in critical but stable condition after having been shot twice in the stomach in an attempted coup by a political rival.

Ramos-Horta cannot be easily pigeon-holed. If you are looking for a poster-boy for Western-style pacifism, you will be sorely disappointed. If you think that someone with an M.A. in Peace Studies is by definition unfit to lead a nation in war and through war and afterwards, but only afterwards, through a process of truth-telling and reconciliation, think again. A pacifist by temperament and conviction, Ramos-Horta nonetheless understands that the use of lethal force can destroy a nation, but it can also liberate it. Below the fold, I recount his life, in large part in his own words. 

José Ramos-Horta was born in Dili, capital of East Timor, in 1949, to a Timorese mother and a Portugese father. Educated in a Catholic mission in the small village of Soibada, the fact that the village became the headquarters of FRETILIN, the armed revolutionary movement that sought independence in the wake of the Indonesian invasion of 1975, had a determining effect on his life and the life of his family. He joined the movement early on. Of his eleven brothers and sisters, three were killed by the Indonesian military. This is how he tells the story (from a February 25, 2003 New York Times Op-Ed):

I often find myself counting how many of us are left in this world. One recent morning my two surviving brothers and I had coffee together. And I found myself counting again. We were seven brothers and five sisters, another large family in this tiny Catholic country.

One brother died when he was a baby. Antonio, our oldest brother, died in 1992 of lack of medical care. Three other siblings were murdered in our country's long conflict with Indonesia. One, a younger sister, Maria Ortencia, died on Dec. 19, 1978, killed by a rocket fired from a OV-10 Bronco aircraft, which the United States had sold to Indonesia. She was buried on a majestic mountaintop and her grave was tended by the humble people of the area for 20 years.

To this day, the tiny state of East Timor is Asia's poorest country. About 90 percent of its 800,000 people follow the Roman Catholic faith. It was little different in the 1970s. The Christian faith sets the east Timorese apart from the dominant religio-ethnic groups of what is now neighboring Indonesia.

In his youth, Ramos-Horta was actively involved in the development of political awareness in Portugese Timor. His anti-colonial activities led to his exile to Portugese East Africa [Mozambique] for two years (1970-71). His grandfather had been exiled before him, by Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship, to the Azores Islands, then Cape Verde, Portuguese Guinea, and finally, to Portuguese Timor. Some people never learn to throw in the towel and conform. This non-learning has been the great strength of Ramos-Horta’s life.

In October 1975, with the simmering war with the Indonesian army and their Timorese lackeys taking a turn for the worse, Ramos-Horta, a young journalist, takes a group of five foreign television reporters to the town of Balibo to film Indonesian border incursions. Ramos-Horta leaves the town just hours before the two Australians, two British, and one New Zealander, the so-called “Balibo Five,” are captured and executed on the morning of 16 October by the Indonesian military.

A moderate in the emerging Timorese nationalist leadership, he is appointed Foreign Minister in the “Democratic Republic of East Timor” government proclaimed by the pro-independence parties in November 1975. He is 25 years old. He leaves East Timor three days before the Indonesian troops invade to plead the Timorese case before the United Nations.

Ramos-Horta arrived in New York to address the UN Security Council and urge them to take action in the face of the Indonesian occupation. Over the course of the ensuing war that went on for a total of 24 years, 100,000 East Timorese – 12% of the population, would die. Thousands of East Timorese men were tortured and executed, and thousands of East Timorese women raped and reduced to sexual slavery. The mass starvation of children was another conscious policy of the Indonesian government.

Ramos-Horta is a family man. He cannot forget what happened, not only to his country, but to his family, though amazingly, he has shown he is willing to forgive. As will any devout Catholic, he remains faithful to his siblings to death and beyond:

Early in September of last year [2002], I went through the heart-wrenching process of unearthing the improvised grave of our sister, whom I last saw when she was 18. As her body was exhumed, I noticed that the back of her head and one side of her face had been blown off. She must have died instantly. We reburied our sister in the cemetery in the capital, Dili. Two other siblings who were killed, our brothers Nuno and Guilherme, were executed by Indonesian soldiers in 1977. With little information on the area where they were killed and disposed of, we have no hope of recovering their bodies for a dignified burial.

The Indonesian government and army did not act on their own. This is how Ramos-Horta describes what happened:

 

There is hardly a family in my country that has not lost a loved one. Many families were entirely wiped out during the decades of occupation by Indonesia and the war of resistance against it. The United   States and other Western nations contributed to this tragedy. Some bear a direct responsibility because they helped Indonesia by providing military aid. Others were accomplices through indifference and silence.

 

As the tragedy unfolded, Ramos-Horta served as the Permanent Representative of FRETILIN to the UN between 1975 and 1985. He arrived in the United States with a total of twenty-five dollars in his pocket. He was often penniless, and survived partly through the generosity of Americans who admired his politics and determination. On a shoestring budget and despite general indifference to his people’s plight – it is no different now, in the case of countries with a despotic regime holding imperious sway over starving masses - he traveled worldwide to explain his party's position.

During this period, Ramos-Horta studied Public International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law (1983) and at Antioch University where he completed a Master of Arts degree in Peace Studies (1984). He was trained in Human Rights Law at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg (1983). A talented musician, he paid his way through his studies by performing in Bruge jazz clubs. For three months at the end of his studies he played Riff Raff in a London production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He attended Post-Graduate courses in American Foreign Policy at Columbia University in New York (1983). He is a Senior Associate Member of the University of Oxford's St Antony's College (1987).

That is what Wikipedia has to say about his studies. Settling in Sydney, Australia, in 1989, Ramos-Horta founds the DTP (diplomacy training program) in the law faculty at the University of New South Wales. The DTP aims to train indigenous peoples, minorities and human rights activists from the Asia-Pacific region in the UN human rights system. Despite all these achievements, Ramos-Horta’s memories are bitter:

I still acutely remember the suffering and misery brought about by war. It would certainly be a better world if war were not necessary. Yet I also remember the desperation and anger I felt when the rest of the world chose to ignore the tragedy that was drowning my people. We begged a foreign power to free us from oppression, by force if necessary.

The help did not come for decades, at the cost of one hundred thousand human lives. Finally, in 1999, a UN-backed force of mostly Australian soldiers enters East Timor and secures its independence. In UN-sponsored elections of 2001, FREITLIN wins a large number of seats in the newly formed assembly.

Ramos-Horta knows that his own country’s independence was secured by the force of foreign arms. It should come as no surprise, then, that he supported the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here are his words in the run-up to the invasion:

I am unimpressed by the grandstanding of certain European leaders. Their actions undermine the only truly effective means of pressure on the Iraqi dictator: the threat of the use of force. . . .

[I]f the antiwar movement dissuades the United  States and its allies from going to war with Iraq, it will have contributed to the peace of the dead. Saddam Hussein will emerge victorious and ever more defiant. What has been accomplished so far will unravel. Containment is doomed to fail. We cannot forget that despots protected by their own elaborate security apparatus are still able to make decisions.

Saddam Hussein has dragged his people into at least two wars. He has used chemical weapons on them. He has killed hundreds of thousands of people and tortured and oppressed countless others. So why, in all of these demonstrations, did I not see one single banner or hear one speech calling for the end of human rights abuses in Iraq, the removal of the dictator and freedom for the Iraqis and the Kurdish people? If we are going to demonstrate and exert pressure, shouldn't it be focused on the real villain, with the goal of getting him to surrender his weapons of mass destruction and resign from power? To neglect this reality, in favor of simplistic and irrational anti-Americanism, is obfuscating the true debate on war and peace. . . .

History has shown that the use of force is often the necessary price of liberation. A respected Kosovar intellectual once told me how he felt when the world finally interceded in his country: “I am a pacifist. But I was happy, I felt liberated, when I saw NATO bombs falling.”

Once East Timor gained independence, did everything fall into place? Of course not. Civil war broke out in 2006, and foreign troops again occupied the capital in order to restore order. In May 2007, Ramos-Horta became East Timor’s president. But as the events of these last days have shown, the cycle of violence has not come to an end. If anyone knows the rule in his own person, it is Ramos-Horta: the one who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Bad as that is, worse is nevertheless imaginable. In his own words:

Look at what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Does anybody have the moral right to tell the Vietnamese “you were wrong in intervening in Cambodia in 1979”? I applauded it. Vietnam was the only country in the world with the guts to do it.

Can we tell the great African statesman, one of my favourite leaders in the world, Julius Nyrere of Tanzania, 'Sorry, you were wrong in intervening in Uganda to get rid of  Idi Amin, when he was the only African leader with the moral courage to do it? ...

We say that the Security Council is the only source of international legitimacy for intervention. So when the Security Council said no to intervention in Rwanda even when genocide was going on, was that right? The Security Council was wrong in Cambodia, Uganda and Rwanda. . . .

I never accept being locked in an ideological straitjacket. I see good and bad in all sides. The left cannot claim to have all the virtues. The left has failed miserably over the decades. And the right doesn't have a monopoly on virtues, or on evil.

For background on the latest events in East Timor go here. For this post, I drew heavily from this online resource.

 

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

John - I have been reading your notes on violence and I am of course aware of my own hidden violence and my use of state violence to control the impossible nature of FAE in my youngest son - I hope you have seen this item noted by Targuman. (I have also read a bit - notably Craigie which you mentioned earlier in the series). I am not in agreement with the necessary goodness of what seems convenient in the constraints of a particular time. Of course my personal tests have been limited - and like the Hobbits, I am protected from the full scope of the evil that seems to be implicit in the world.

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Bob, for the link to Bruce Chilton's piece. He evokes much territory and is very much aware of the fact that scripture has been and continues to be used to justify violence of the most sordid kind.

But, if now the Bible is supposed to be used to justify standing by idly while the innocent are slaughtered, I fail to see how that is an improvement. Chilton's piece is, in the end, a giant waffle.

A live and let die attitude is the default foreign policy of most nations. It's called Realpolitik. That Jews or Christians acquiesce in this state of affairs constitutes a betrayal of their faith.

This was not the case for many, many centuries, in which war and peace were issues decided by kings and such, not by the people. But that has changed. Democracy carries with it responsibilities other ages could hardly have imagined.

The old socialist cry, "fascism means war," is not popular today. John Lennon's slogans are. Is that an improvement, or a sign of self-absorption?

Many of Waldensian ancestors in the faith were socialists. Some of them, including my grandfather-in-law, lived by the slogan just referred; they thought it their duty to oppose fascism, if necessary by the force of arms. He died a slow death, poisoned by ricin, at the hands of the Italian fascists. I point this out to help you understand one of the existential bases of my positions. I am fully aware of how uncouth they seem in polite society today.

Peter Kirk notes in another comment thread that he does not condemn Ramos-Horta, though he does not agree with his life choices either.

That is a comfortable position. But in a revolutionary situation, as was East Timor, it is necessary to take sides. No use bringing goodness into the discussion. It's all about evil, but some evils are lesser than others.

Like the Hobbits, depending on who we are, it may not be our role to be warriors. But we still have to take sides, sometimes at the risk of our lives. This side of the kingdom, that may involve combat duty, or supporting those who go into combat supplied with arms paid for by our taxes and approved of by our elected officials.

By making it our first priority to avoid the use of violence, we may actually make things worse, and violence more virulent. Historians point out that reluctance to enter WWII in a timely fashion resulted in far greater loss of life and limb than would have otherwise been the case.

It is no fun to point out this truth, because it throws into doubt our deepest and most comfortable certainties.

[Bob MacDonald]

Live and let die? John. Live to the tests you are given. No policy can follow from that if it disagrees with the voluntary laying down of one's life by the word of God. We just watched My Son Jack - Kipling's son's story from WW I - And this past week we had occasion to remember the poetry that Britten set of Wilfred Owen in the War Requiem - Abraham refused and slew his son and half the seed of Europe one by one. Iraq was not justified in the form that it took then or now. The divine right of kings - also a false justification, has been replaced by the divine right of the market. This is hardly the quam olim Abrahae promisisti, et semini eius.

[JohnFH]

Bob,

I never said, of course, that the divine right of the market justifies anything. If you mean to suggest that a commitment to capitalism is the subtext of Ramos Horta's support for the invasion of Iraq, I believe you are sorely mistaken. If you mean to suggest that Blair's decision to take GB into Iraq was based on something other than his sense of right and justice, once again, I think you are sorely mistaken. If you wish to question the motives of Bush and Cheney and the majority of US Senators, Republican and Democrat, who authorized the war, be my guest. I might even agree with you, at least in part. Even if they did what they did for the wrong reasons, it is still not settled whether what they did resulted in more harm than good.

WWI was a senseless war, and Wilson, with messianic missionary fervor, took the US into it when we could well have stayed out. A good thing or bad thing? How does one decide? The US waited far longer than it should have to enter the European theater of WWII. Roosevelt knew better. Over the opposition of an isolationist Congress, he bent and broke innumerable laws to prepare the nation for war just the same. Historians say he did the right thing, and that if he hadn't, millions more may have had to die before the war machines of Germany and Japan were defeated.

Wilfred Owen's poem is fitting for WWI, but not for WWII, and not for the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq either.

Just last night or the night before, there were grand celebrations in Baghdad among Iraqis on the first anniversary of the pushback known as the surge in western media. Overall violence is down 90 per cent from its peak.

Are you sure you would go and tell the Iraqis to their face, the vast majority - Kurds and Shias, enfranchised politically for the first time, "this never should have happened"?

You seem awfully sure that someone like Ramos Horta lacks understanding of what was and is at stake in Iraq. You know, he couldn't care less about being pro-war, or anti-war. That's a comfortable way of seeing things he was not permitted in his life to know. He only wants to be pro-Iraqi, and that meant for him supporting the possibility that they might achieve peace through war.

In what sense is it pro-Iraqi to suggest that the Iraqis, like the Syrians to the west and the Iranians to the east, should have just contented themselves with living under a dictatorship - in the Iraqis' case, a dictatorship that ruthlessly murdered, malnourished, and mistreated its Shia majority?

What if, in the midst of grievous error and irresponsibility on all sides, the end of Saddam Hussein was an answer to the prayers of millions of oppressed Iraqis? Of course they were praying for the Mahdi to come, and still do, to save them. Instead they got Bush, who does a poor imitation of Cyrus. But history is like that.

I assume you believe as I do that it matters not that the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi Abels whose blood cries out from the ground, and the wails of Shia and Kurdish widows and orphans produced by "chemical" Ali, were followers of Muhammad.

The prayers of Hannahs and Marys are powerful. They may well trump my prayers and yours for a world here and now in which 20 year old soldiers from Canada and the US do not have to lose life and limb halfway around the world in a war we could well have avoided.

[Bob MacDonald]

Dear John, I won't argue, least of all with you. It is not our custom. On all points where you assume agreement, we have concord. On the other side of the vexed question of violence - we likely have the same discord in our own individual hearts. The king died for his enemies. In the case of recent conflicts, I cannot help thinking that there were alternatives that were not followed - and the reasons for the corporate failures are inherent in their own self-interests. E.g. willingness to give up on the need for oil might have proven a much better solution than the cascading errors on Kuwait and Iraq that go back 100 years. (What is the will of the Father that we should do it - rather than say 'Lord, Lord'?) And as to what happened before my birth, wasn't Germany in the 30s a consequence of the post-war treaties - It seems to me that Margaret MacMillan (Paris 1919) has written about all kinds of ad hoc decisions that still are working themselves out today (e.g. Kosovo). Opening at random: p192 - No limit is fixed save the capacity of the German people for payment, determined not by their enemies but by their labour. The German people would thus be condemned to perpetual slave labour.

Europe and Empire with all the difficulties of colonialism could not deal with anything but business as usual. Indeed, time makes ancient good uncouth.

[JohnFH]

The discord in the heart of which you speak, Bob, burns brightly within me. How many 18 and 20 year olds have I seen off to war in the last few years? All kids, boys and girls, who have made clear choices, sometimes against the will of their parents. They tend to show up in uniform in church the Sunday before they head off on a tour. They look to me, and everyone else, for signs of approval, of understanding, of a sense of solidarity. Those who served in other wars, the "bad" ones and the "good" ones, are quick to offer support.

I understand something, at least, of the laments of Jeremiah.