The President of Peace
(Originally published in Esquire Latin America)
It’s 7am, and the Portuguese National Guards have just arrived at the Presidential compound, all crew-cut, bicep and German sub-machine gun. Armed sentries salute as the silver Presidential Land Rover rolls out, sandwiched between seven 4-wheel drive vehicles. Police lights flash. Jose Ramos Horta, the Nobel peace prize-winning President of the tropical half-island of Timor-Leste, is on the move.
The convoy swerves through the potholed streets of the capital, Dili, past tshe harbor where dug-out canoes butt up against container ships, and heads inland to Ermera, Timor-Leste’s beautiful coffee growing district. A year ago this was enemy territory. Nestled into verdant highlands 40km south west of Dili, Ermera offered a perfect hideout for the rebels who pumped two bullets into Horta just over one year ago, forcing him into a 10-day coma.
But today the President comes in peace. He is here to launch his Anti-Poverty Task Force, a hearts-and-minds-winning scheme to fund community projects in poverty-stricken areas—which is most of the country.
The rumbling convoy grinds to a halt and Horta is out of the car. People stoop and kiss his outstretched hand, others shake it shyly. Women in colourful tais (Timorese woven scarves) bang tin gongs and wooden drums, while men sing, jumping and swaying from foot to foot. The effect is cacophonous, joyful and chaotic. Hundreds of villagers line up in the midday sun to plead with the President. They ask for roads, a clinic, electricity, chairs and tables for the school. They want peace, and for the politicians to stop fighting each other.
Sitting in his kaki cargo pants and lace up boots, a local tais around his neck, the President listens intently. This is the part he loves, being among the “common people”. When he finally takes the microphone, he’s like the MC at a wedding, cracking jokes. He hands out pens, and a mobile phone to a guy who blushes when the President—who has an 80 percent approval rating—tells him, “Use it to call your girlfriend”. He promises help, money.
But later that night, leaning wearily against the kitchen bench with his boots un-laced, Horta cuts a Willy Loman figure, the great salesman dwarfed by the unattainable dream: “I feel bad that mostly I create the hope and illusion of a better life for them, but in the end, I personally as President can deliver very little. So when I’m able to deliver the few small things they ask, they’re happy. And I’m also happy."
For the President, the scene at Ermera is played out in villages across Timore-Leste. This is Horta in action, doing what he’s always done. The arch diplomat cajoles, convinces, using the same personal touch he’s employed on congressmen, statesmen, politicians and rebels. In the ten days I spend with him in Timor-Leste, I see it over and again. Like an old warhorse, he clocks a steady pace, fighting the battle he’s always fought—one that’s far from won.
The challenges for the newest and poorest nation in South East Asia, a former Portuguese colony that in 1999 won a 24-year, David and Goliath-scale struggle for independence from Indonesia, are enormous: how do you take a war-ravaged nation with no infrastructure, massive unemployment, poverty and illiteracy, with a malnourished, agricultural population dying of diseases not seen in developed countries for decades, and bring it into the 21st century? Add a backdrop of clan-like tribal feuds, land disputes, street gangs, corruption scandals and an international community of NGOs, aid workers, UN officials and diplomats breathing down the young country’s neck, and the task is even harder.
***
The Presidential compound is a simple cluster of steep, pitched-roof palapas, which Horta designed himself, modeled on traditional Timorese houses, in the town of Meti Aut, fifteen minutes east of Dili. When I meet the President early on a Monday morning, he’s at the breakfast table, meters from where he lay dying on February 11 last year. “The irony is that I was shot on Robert F Kennedy Boulevard – the curse of the Kennedy’s – and I would say I’m the biggest Kennedy fan alive,” he says, over a bowl of oats with soy milk, dates and walnuts. I ask him how he’s feeling now. “The doctors said I might have nightmares, that I shouldn’t return to the same home. But I came back and have no nightmares whatsoever, no fear whatsoever.”
Horta’s sister, Ida, who runs the household, brings a small plate with vitamins and a glass of water. There are places set for whoever’s there – the President keeps a surprisingly open house. In 2006, about 500 refugees camped in his grounds. In this case he’s hosting relatives from Portugal, his school-age nieces, me, and photographer Darcy Holdorf. Many nights there are dinner guests. There’s a squad of security guards, a recent addition which Horta hates. “If I don’t get shot by an assailant, I’ll get killed in the crossfire,” he says.
He lives in a single, non-air-conditioned room, with posters of Elvis Presley and James Dean on rough timber planks. He has a study with a collection of old typewriters, a TV room where he retires nightly to watch the news (he prefers Al Jazeera to BBC, BBC to CNN). On the walls are photographs of Horta with celebrities – Harrison Ford, Bill Clinton, Pope Benedict. Outside, there’s a small aviary, deer park, a cage with two vultures, an old Jeep (his favourite mode of transport), two motorcycles and a bright yellow, horse-less buggy he once bought with the idea of riding it around town to attract tourists. “I had this idea that it could be like in Central Park,” he says. “But it never took off.”
He’s full of ideas: his projects range from eradicating poverty and nuclear weapons, to writing a children’s book about a crocodile, and mounting an exhibit of his own landscape photography. He never wanted to be President, he says, but was elected to the 5-year-term in 2007, after serving as both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Had history not tied him to the tragic fate of his country, he’d be making films in Hollywood – “political thrillers”. But the bloody story of Timor has defined Horta—who turns 60 this year—from the 24 years he spent in exile, giving voice to a cause in a country most people had never heard of, to the Nobel he co-won for his efforts in 1996, to the bullets that just missed his spine on February 11 last year, as he fought to patch the wounds that were threatening to tear the fledgling nation apart.
He has less hair than he had in the 70s, when he was a swarthy, young rebel in army fatigues, or in the 80s during his New York years, when he sported an afro to go with the quirky bow-tie that was his signature. Now he’s thinning at the temples and shaved to a respectable close cut, graying like a silverback gorilla save for the thick black eyebrows. He frowns when he listens, holding his subject steady in his gaze, which can be intimidating or flattering, depending on who’s talking, and his mood. A tactician and a diplomat, he can be charming or abrasive, as journalists and staffers who’ve been at the end of his rages have attested.
There’s a determined clamp to a jaw padded with evidence of life’s accumulated pleasures – good food, Portuguese cheese, fine wine and port. He’s trying to lose 10 kilos, he tells me, which he put on since the assassination attempt. He designs his own clothes, with a penchant for Nehru-collared shirts and jackets. “He’s a bit of a dandy,” says his friend, LA-based Australian film maker Jan Sharp. “He has a staggering centre of gravity, great calm and certainty – and humility – but at the same time terrific vanity.” His reputation as a Lothario is legendary. “He’s a mix of Gandhi and Latin playboy,” says his US military-trained, Cuban cigar-smoking son Loro, an academic and defense advisor to the UN. After February 11 he told his dad, who nicknames his son “Mossad,” for his pro-Israel politics: “I’m not like you Old Man, I’m not going to forgive. I’d go after (the assassin), his mother, his daughters, his cat, his fish – everybody goes.”
Not Horta the Elder. From his hospital bed he was telling his would-be assassins he already forgave them. It was a mix of benevolence and pragmatism. With the army loyal to him, he was avoiding the bloodbath he knew would follow recrimination. But in the months following his return to Dili, he met with the leader of the group that almost killed him, who later surrendered, and tried to talk things out. “I said to him, how many times (have) I told you not to use weapons, not to use violence? Why you did it?” he said in a TV interview, three months later. “He’s a diplomat and a tactician, but he’s not insincere. He’s not privately boiling away,” says Jan Sharp. “He doesn’t seem to feel any vengeance.”
An old-fashioned social democrat, his heroes are the Gandhis and Mandelas of the world. He sees his role as conciliator, above party politics. “When there are too many emotions it’s important that someone tries to be as neutral as possible,” he says. “I have no particular loyalty to (Prime Minister) Xanana or (Opposition Leader) Alkatiri or any of them.”
He’s pardoned murderers and rapists, and suggested he’s prepared to issue post-trial pardons to his would-be assassins, prompting criticism from human rights groups and international NGOs that he’s undermining an already weak justice system, and abusing his Presidential powers. “Timor-Leste has seen too much impunity, and too many people have evaded responsibility for their actions,” the International Crisis Group said in a statement earlier this year.
***
Timor-Leste is a small, crocodile-shaped half-island of jagged mountains, green valleys, thundering rivers and silky white beaches on the far eastern edge of the Indonesian archipelago, less than 400 km north of Australia. It’s about 15,000 square kilometers in area, making it slightly bigger than the Mexican State of Queretaro.
Despite its size, the country has been a theatre for competing interests for centuries. Part of the vast international trade networks opened by the Chinese and the Indians in the 13th century, it was prized for honey, wax and aromatic sandalwood. The latter lured both the Portuguese and Dutch in the mid-1500s, who fought over the island sporadically, eventually dividing it in 1913, creating the international boundary that exists between Timor and Indonesia today.
Under the Portuguese, Timor-Leste was a neglected trading post, barely developed, and soon denuded of its prized sandalwood. Its cultural identity – a complex system of clans and kingdoms – stayed largely intact, until the Japanese arrived in WWII, and set about trying to subdue the proud, 95 percent Catholic, Latino-Asian nation, with devastating effect.
Jose Ramos Horta was born in 1949 in post-war Dili, the white-skinned son of a Timorese mother and a Portuguese father, one of 11 siblings. His father, a Portuguese naval gunner, was exiled to Timor for his part in hijacking two ships to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Horta remembers him as “a quiet, withdrawn man whose most faithful companion was a short-wave radio that enabled him to monitor Lisbon and the BBC.” The young Jose became a journalist, but soon followed in his father’s footsteps when, aged 18, he was exiled to Mozambique, for two years after making drunken anti-Portuguese comments to a group of Australian hippies.
When he returned home he helped form the party that was to become Fretilin, the Revolutionary Front for the Independence of Timor-Leste. When the Portuguese dictatorship collapsed in 1974, the colonizers effectively abandoned the island. A short civil war followed, won by Fretilin, who declared independence. Nine days later, under the pretext that the new government was communist, Indonesia invaded, with what, years later, was revealed as the full knowledge of Australia and the US: the two powers Timor-Leste had hoped might defend it. The young Horta—the 25-year-old Foreign Minister—had flown to New York to plead his nation’s case to the UN. Indonesian troops landed while he was in the air.
Estimates of how many died under the Indonesians run as high as 200,000, more than a fifth of the Timorese population. Thousands were shot, their bodies thrown into the sea. Others were killed by famine and disease. Many were raped, tortured and uprooted from their tribal lands. Guerrilla fighters took to the hills, and were bombed by Indonesia in an ‘encirclement and annihilation’ campaign.
In New York, Horta persuaded the Security Council to vote unanimously for Timor-Leste’s independence, demanding Indonesia’s withdrawal. “That was the year my schooling in international hypocrisy began. It was just another Security Council resolution that no-one had the stomach to pursue,” he has said.
Then came lonely years spent knocking on doors, living out of a suitcase and pleading his case to whoever would listen. His marriage – to Ana Pessoa, a former exile to Mozambique and now General Prosecutor in Timor-Leste’s government – broke down, a casualty by his own admission of a string of “romantic liaisons”. He’s never remarried. Loro Horta, his son from that union, remembers: “He never had the chance of being a good dad because he was always moving around. He was a miserable father, but a very good friend. When I was young I used to be pissed off at him, you know, why does this guy never send money to my mother, why is he never here? But later on I came to realize he didn’t send money because he didn’t have any.”
“He owned three suits and four ties, and would sleep in a bus shelter if he had to,” says Timor-based British journalist Max Stahl. He worked nights as a security guard to get extra money. From cockroach-infested Manhattan bedsit by night to the comfy lounges of the UN by day, a refugee from a country that was an unknown speck on the other side of the world, Horta honed his diplomacy skills – making friends at the UN and in the US Congress. “He has the most astonishing contacts. He can call up just about anybody. The Kennedy’s are friends of his,” says Stahl.
He was Timor’s man on the outside, while guerilla leader Xanana Gusmao was on the inside – a fellow journalist-turned freedom fighter, Gusmao led the resistance in the jungle, then later from an Indonesian prison cell. The two made a formidable team, communicating via short-wave radio and smuggled communiqué. “The partnership that he and Xanana built really started pulling the struggle together. They were the only two who could speak in that way to the diplomatic world. They had a real intellectual partnership, they knew where the other was going, and what they were doing,” says Sara Niner, author of a biography of Gusmao. It’s an alliance that’s strained over the years, but continues to this day. “They’re old warhorses and they know they have to work together for the sake of the country. They’ve both given up their lives for it.”
“Nothing’s more important to him. He never put a relationship first, and to an extent, that’s his cross,” says Stahl. “The person that’s made him successful in doing what he’s done has made him unsuccessful in other ways. He doesn’t have an intimate relationship. He doesn’t even have a lot of friends. He has many friends, but none of them intimate. He doesn’t share his private thoughts.”
In 1991, Stahl brought Timor-Leste to the world’s attention by filming the Dili Massacre. Indonesian officers fired on a peaceful protest at the grave of a murdered activist, killing and wounding hundreds of unarmed students. Stahl buried the dramatic tapes, then stole back at night to dig them out. When they were shown two months later, the incident became Timor’s equivalent to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Suddenly, the world was watching. It was an opportunity Horta didn’t miss – plying the airwaves and knocking on diplomatic doors. The UN appointed a special envoy to deal with East Timor, while the US Congress, and many European countries, cut aid to Indonesia.
When Horta won the Nobel in 1996, with fellow Timorese activist Bishop Carlos Belo, the speaking invitations started arriving. Still, there was the awful homesickness, and the guilt that came with it, knowing that back in Timor his countrymen—three of his brothers and one sister, in fact—were dying, being murdered, raped and starved to death under the brutal rule of the occupiers.
In 1998, the Asian Financial Crisis brought Indonesia to the brink of bankruptcy and the Soeharto regime to its knees. Horta seized his chance, insisting the new Indonesian leadership allow an East Timorese referendum. On August 30, 1999, 78.5 percent voted in favour of independence. As a parting gift, Indonesian-backed militias staged a scorched earth campaign, destroying two thirds of the country’s infrastructure and three quarters of its buildings before Australian-led, UN peace-keepers arrived. In December, Horta returned home to a hero’s welcome. People thronged the streets, making the four-kilometer ride from the airport to the city centre so impassable he had to get out and walk. “Viva!” he shouted. “Viva!” the people responded. And it felt as though the dream might finally have come true.
***
After a three-year transition under the UN, Timor-Leste became independent in May, 2002. At first, it seemed like the newest nation of the 21st century was off to a good start. Aid workers and UN staff poured into the country, Timor-Leste signed a revenue-sharing treaty with Australia over lucrative oil and gas supplies in the Timor Sea, and the government created a multi-billion petroleum fund to safeguard the nation’s oil wealth.
Then came 2006, when a dispute over army promotions erupted into rioting on the streets of Dili. Dozens were killed and 150,000 people, fearing for their lives, piled into refugee camps, while rebel soldiers escaped to the mountains south of the capital. Chaos reigned as police fought the army, the army fought among itself, and gangs of machete-wielding young men roamed the streets, burning houses and stoning cars.
One of the key figures was Alfredo Reinado, a charismatic, ex-military policeman who joined the rebel soldiers and took to the mountains with a band of followers, claiming to represent the true will of the people. A self-styled Che Guevara, he tapped into a vein of dissatisfaction with corruption and infighting in the new government, and frustration at the slow pace of progress after the high hopes and promises of independence – jobs, infrastructure, education – were still unmet. Many of his followers were young, unemployed men who grew up under the occupation, and who’d spent their lives fighting against the status quo, not for it.
Horta, who was Foreign Minister at the time, took to the streets. At one point he confronted an angry mob trying to loot a rice storehouse. “Thousands of people were trying to break in,” said Timorese journalist Jose Belo. “Horta went there that afternoon and told them all to queue up. The next day there was a big queue of people, and they all got the rice. It was amazing how he calmed down the situation.”
“It was just instinctive, because I’m not even a courageous type of person, I’m not a Rambo that enjoys danger,” Horta says. “My brother told me: this is not your responsibility, you are not the police. Why would I, for instance, at 1 in the morning, 10 in the evening, park my car right in front of the Australian embassy, or the US embassy, just to make sure that no-one is coming to attack them? But if someone did, what would I do? I just believe in my power of persuasion, I would send them back.”
“One day I went to the hospital, that day when the police and army were shooting at each other, so there were wounded military people, wounded police, and their respective families, all in the same room. I came out and a crying woman came to hug me, saying, “You are the only one we see running back and forth around town. Where are the others? Have they abandoned us? At that point I thought, God, when am I going to break down?”
Eventually, the crisis lead to military intervention by several other countries and the resignation of the Fretilin Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri, to be replaced by Horta in a caretaker role. “I never wanted to be Prime Minister,” he says. “I accepted, and I contributed very decisively to stabilize the situation. It was my mere presence and personality that helped calm the situation.” Things began to settle down. There were peaceful elections in 2007, during which Horta campaigned for and won the Presidency. After months of careful negotiations, some rebels surrendered, a process Horta had personally overseen. That’s why it came as a shock – a complete surprise to him – when the very men he’d been negotiating with turned up at his house and shot him.
***
At 6am on February 11 – a day referred to in Timor by its date, with the same before-and-after gravity as September 11 – the President set off for his morning walk. With the sky barely light, wearing baggy running shorts and an old t-shirt, he powered past the guards in the guardhouse to “Robert F Kennedy Boulevard”, the name he gives his street (street signage being mostly absent in Dili), and down to the waterfront, a shaded, rubbish-strewn stretch of white beach and mangrove, towards the towering hill-top statue of Christo Rei, Christ the Redeemer.
Shortly afterwards, according to a leaked internal UN document, the rebel Reinado and two carloads of men, armed with automatic weapons, arrived at the compound and disarmed the guards. Exactly what Reinado had planned may never be known. What is certain is that an hour later, Reinado was dead, the President badly wounded, and the rebel’s second-in-command, Gastao Salsinha, was on his way to staging a second, unsuccessful ambush on Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, who escaped unharmed.
Some analysts say it was a botched coup attempt, others a series of mistakes that had unintended consequences. According to Timor specialist James Dunn, Reinado’s men occupied the residence, hoping to seek assurances that surrender conditions, culminating in his pardon, would be carried out. But two soldiers unexpectedly turned up and shot Reinado. Horta heard the shooting and hurried back to the compound, where he was shot by one of Reinado’s men, a rebel enraged at the killing of his leader.
“When I returned to the house it was silent, not a soul,” Horta says. He strode ahead of his bodyguards, and came face to face with his would-be killer. “He looked at me, no emotion, just pointed the gun. I turned to run, and felt the bullets go in. It was a painful, burning sensation. The first shot I didn’t fall, I dived to avoid other bullets, but he fired on me when I was on the ground.” The first discharge hit him on his right shoulder. The second landed 2mm from his spinal cord. Rushed to hospital, they put him in an induced coma. After three hours of emergency treatment, he was evacuated to the Royal Darwin Hospital, in northern Australia. He awoke ten days later.
“I was in that dark frontier between life and death,” he says. He had a dream: he was wrestling with three men who were trying to strangle him. “At one point I said, At least tell me, what have I done wrong? Then a voice came: Let him go, he’s done nothing wrong. And then the three just disappeared, and I was released. When I woke up on the 22nd a pretty blonde nurse was next to me. She read me the date. I said, no, that cannot be. I’m supposed to be in Adelaide.” He was planning to auction off Cuban cigars given to him by Fidel Castro in the Australian city.
***
After the attack, the government imposed a state of siege and a curfew, and brought the army and police under a joint command to track down the rebels. Reinado’s supporters surrendered one by one. After taking refuge with a hard core in Ermera, Salsinha surrendered on April 29 on negotiated terms. Once again, the fate of Timor was tied up with Horta’s own. Against all expectations, his near-death led to a rebirth: instead of civil war, there was a show of unity that put paid to the crisis that started in 2006. Calm has returned to the streets of Dili—for now. A recent World Bank report claims little has been done to remove the underlying causes of political instability, which could trigger a return to fighting. “Timor-Leste’s long occupation left violence as a habitual way of dealing with the disputes and frustration, and little has been done so far to reconcile old enemies or systematically address the deep trauma of two generations of internecine conflict,” the report says.
“There’s a small window of opportunity in which people are willing to stay quiet and see if the government delivers. We’ve got two or three more years maximum in which we’ve got to deliver,” says the President’s son, Loro Horta. “This is sort of our last chance.”
As for Horta, he’s getting weary, and feels he’s paid his dues. “He gets tired, he gets bored, he’s done it so many times,” says Stahl. “He’s no longer capable of being anything else.” There’s been talk of him leaving early to work at the UN—his name has been bandied as a successor to Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon—and he’s not ruling out an early exit. “I would love to resign by next year,” he says, in an interview at his dining table, on my last day with the President. “I would love to end my mandate early. If we’re stable and economically doing well, let me exit through the golden gate. But I keep believing what people tell me, that I’m needed.”