The free world should embrace, encourage, empower and celebrate its newest nation and youngest democracy
By Benedict Rogers in UCA News
On this day, 23 years ago, I walked from the centre of Timor-Leste’s (East Timor’s) capital Dili to Tasi-Tolu — eight kilometers — and joined hundreds of thousands of people to witness the birth of a new nation.
I listened to the United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan proclaim the new country’s sovereignty, alongside the former United States president Bill Clinton, and Megawati Sukarnoputri, the president of Indonesia — which had illegally and brutally occupied Timor-Leste for 24 years — and the prime minister of Australia, John Howard, whose country had led the international peace-keeping operation.
It was a truly heart-stopping moment.
At midnight, when the flag was raised for the first time and the national anthem was sung for the first time, I turned to the man standing next to me — a Catholic priest, Father Francisco Maria Fernandes, who was one of the first Timorese to be exiled after the Indonesian invasion in 1975 and whom I had known in Macau for several years.
I asked him this question: “Throughout all your years of exile and struggle, did you ever believe you would see this day of freedom and independence?”
He looked at me with a smile and nodded. And I remember Fernandes’ words vividly.
He said: “Yes, I did. Throughout our struggle, people all over the world said to me, ‘Why do you carry on? You are fighting a losing battle. Indonesia will never give you freedom. The world will never help you. Why don’t you just give up?’”
But — and with this he looked me in the eyes again — he said: “We had one thing those people did not know about. We trusted God. This was a victory of faith.”
As he said those words, the clock struck midnight, fireworks lit up the night sky, and the world’s newest nation and youngest democracy was born.
Timor-Leste’s birth came amidst enormous pain, destruction and sacrifice.
I spent many weeks in the country in the immediate aftermath of the culmination of its fight for freedom, following the referendum and then the Indonesian military’s mass atrocity vengeance in 1999.
When I first visited Timor-Leste in the months after the carnage, I met street kids who told me how their parents and siblings had been hacked to death with knives and machetes.
I met survivors of massacres whose terror and trauma were visible in their eyes.
I walked through the rubble of burned-out buildings. It is estimated that about 80 percent of Timor-Leste’s physical infrastructure — homes, shops, businesses, schools, clinics, government offices — lay in smoldering ashes.
And I met Father Rafael dos Santos, a Catholic priest in Liquiçá, who sheltered hundreds of people from neighboring villages in his parish church.
Nine months after the Liquiçá massacre, he described to me how an Indonesian soldier had aimed his gun at him, but miraculously, the gun jammed and failed to fire.
Soldiers threw tear gas into the church, opening fire on the crowds of people who then came running out. Somehow, the soldiers knew that some people were hiding on the roof of the church, so they simply fired round after round into the ceiling, until the blood dripped through the ceiling and the screaming stopped.
It was the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991 that brought East Timor as a cause to the world’s attention, and subsequent documentaries, notably Max Stahl’s, which helped raise awareness.
When I was living in Timor-Leste in 2002, just days before Independence Day, I walked the route from the Motael Church in Dili to the cemetery, which had been the scene of the Santa Cruz massacre. I wanted to retrace the steps of the protesters who had marched and died a decade before, and to pray for the new nation that was about to be born.
On Oct. 28, 1991, Indonesian soldiers circled the church where students who had been planning a protest had sought refuge, and shot one young man, Sebastião Gomes, on the steps of the church. A week later, hundreds gathered at the church for his funeral and then marched to the cemetery to lay flowers on his grave. As they walked, they unfurled banners calling for independence and freedom.
When they reached the cemetery, they were surrounded by Indonesian troops and hemmed in. The soldiers opened fire. According to my friend Constancio Pinto, who later became ambassador to Washington, DC, and then a government minister, at least 271 people were killed.
One protester who later became a Timorese parliamentarian and a friend of mine, Gregorio da Cunha Saldanha, was shot and hospitalized. But the police arrested him in the hospital. During his interrogation, he faced repeated torture and was then sentenced to life imprisonment.
Another protest organizer, Francisco Miranda Branco, who also became a parliamentarian and a friend of mine, was jailed for 15 years. Both were sustained in jail by their faith. “I trusted God,” Gregorio told me. “No one else could help me except God.”
I visited Timor-Leste often during its first few years of independence and had the privilege of meeting and working with some courageous priests and nuns.
I remember staying overnight with the Sisters of Charity of the Precious Blood, in their convent in a beautiful wood just outside Lospalos. Sister Julia recounted how, during the violence in 1999 that followed the referendum on independence, Indonesian soldiers knocked at their door and ordered the sisters to leave for Indonesian-controlled West Timor with the army convoy.
The sisters refused, saying their place was with the dying and injured East Timorese people.
“Don’t you know who I am?” the soldier, astonished at the nun’s disobedience, asked. “I am military.”
The sister nodded and replied: “Yes, I know. I am military, too. Military for Christ.”
When I left the convent, I asked Sister Julia whether they had email. She laughed and shook her head. “We don’t have email. But we have Emmanuel.”
I worked closely with a remarkable nun, Sister Maria Lourdes Martins da Cruz — or ‘Mana Lou’ as she is known. She could be described as Timor-Leste’s Mother Teresa.
Founder of a religious community known as the Secular Institute of Brothers and Sisters in Christ (ISMAIK), she has been at the forefront of her country’s struggle for justice, freedom and against poverty. I later became a Catholic in Myanmar, inspired in part by Mana Lou and other Catholics I had come to know in Timor-Leste. I tell their stories in my book From Burma to Rome: A Journey into the Catholic Church.
I came to know the country’s leaders — its former guerrilla fighter and political prisoner and first president, Xanana Gusmao, its former exiled activist and first foreign minister, Dr José Ramos-Horta, Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo of Dili and others. It is remarkable, two decades later, that Gusmao and Ramos-Horta are still in government. Ramos-Horta is now president, and Gusmao is prime minister.
Timor-Leste today is one of Asia’s most successful democracies.
Extreme poverty and doubtless corruption continue to pose challenges, but its democracy has endured.
Despite political turmoil in 2008, which climaxed in an assassination attempt against Ramos-Horta and Gusmao, it is now peaceful, stable and free — and an increasingly important voice for human rights in other parts of the region and the world.
It looks likely that Timor-Leste will finally join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) this year.
If that happens, its membership will bring to the regional bloc an important moral clarity about the importance of human rights and democracy.
Timor-Leste has not forgotten the values that it fought for and won, with such sacrifice, and it continues to draw on its own experiences of human rights struggle to provide lessons and support for others.
In particular, Timor-Leste has long been active in speaking out in solidarity with the democracy movement in Myanmar, and it will likely be a healthy influence in trying to encourage ASEAN to take a more robust line in response to Myanmar’s illegal ruling military dictatorship.
Timor-Leste is also a vocal champion of human rights within the United Nations and has the potential to influence action on the world stage more broadly.
President Ramos-Horta has been personally supportive of my work on North Korea and Myanmar. We have co-authored articles together on the need to bring the perpetrators of crimes against humanity in North Korea and genocide in Myanmar to justice.
Ten years ago, he accepted my invitation to address the Seoul Dialogue for Human Rights on the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, and in 2016, he addressed the South-East Asia Freedom of Religion or Belief conference, which I had co-founded.
In December 2023, my colleagues from Fortify Rights met Ramos-Horta to discuss the human rights crisis in Myanmar, particularly the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated against the country’s various ethnic nationalities, and the genocide of the Rohingya.
Article 14 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) empowers ICC member states to request the prosecutor to investigate international crimes within the court’s jurisdiction.
In 2021, Myanmar’s legitimate National Unity Government (NUG), which consists of parliamentarians elected in 2020 before the 2021 coup d’etat, as well as representatives of the ethnic nationalities, issued a declaration delegating jurisdiction to the ICC to address mass atrocity crimes committed in Myanmar, under Article 12 (3) of the Rome Statute.
Timor-Leste has the opportunity to make a referral, and it would be demonstrating the courage and moral clarity that won it its independence if it did.
In light of the intensifying human rights crisis in Myanmar, and the continued airstrikes against civilians even after the devastating earthquake at the end of March, Timor-Leste must be encouraged to do so, in order to ensure the perpetrators of atrocity crimes in Myanmar are held to account.
On this 23rd anniversary, I look back on my years in Timor-Leste with great fondness. There are not many success stories in the world in recent years, but Timor-Leste is one of the few.
Timor-Leste was the first human rights cause I got deeply involved with, and it paved the way for my engagement with other struggles, particularly Myanmar, North Korea and China.
In a dark world with a host of seemingly endless and intractable conflicts and repressive dictatorships, a world in which liberal democracy and the international rules-based order seem to be under unprecedented threat, Timor-Leste is a beacon of hope.
And it is a country which the free world should embrace, encourage, empower and celebrate, as a poor but vibrant and valiant democracy.
This article was originally published in UCA News.