Prizes reward differing tactics in one struggle

BISHOP Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo's strange role as protector and tribune for his people to the Japanese colonists in Jakarta…

BISHOP Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo's strange role as protector and tribune for his people to the Japanese colonists in Jakarta, like his firm stance against military violence, has not always been understood, especially by young Timorese impatient to see the back of the Indonesians after 21 years of occupation and about 200,000 deaths.

The Indonesians call the Bishop of Dili "hard head" - and "pig, communist, traitor," he says. "The other side calls me `vendido a Indonesia'" (sold to Indonesia).

During a visit to Dublin last year, Bishop Belo spoke to me of his deep concern that "everybody is fighting for their own interests and ideologies".

In recent years, his constant mantra has been about the need for unity in the struggle against the occupation of East Timor. Last year this desire for unity saw him chair a gathering in Austria of Timorese representatives in favour of independence and others supporting integration with Indonesian. He saw Indonesian criticism of this attempt at reconciliation as "arrogant".

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Bishop Belo has sternly resisted any image as surrogate nationalist leader, but when he wants to, this apparently timorous prelate can pack a political punch. He went seamlessly from saying "my role is as a bishop, only that" to making no bones about his perception of the Indonesian presence in his land and the influx of "transmigrants" from other Indonesian islands as "a second colonisation".

The bishop has a well deserved reputation for courage and a simplicity about stating the truth in bald terms. At the time of his Irish visit, relations in the Vatican were not good because of Indonesian pressure on Rome to, in effect, weaken his clerical position. Rome was, playing "realpolitik".

"The Pope tells me he pray's every day for East Timor." But Bishop Belo wondered if the Polish people we suffering in the way his people were, would the Pope be more outspoken. "You send this message to him and those people in the diplomatic line.

Born in 1948 on a rice farm in eastern East Tim or, Carlos missed the worst horrors of the Indonesian invasion in 1975, and its aftermath, because he was studying in the colonial mother country, Portugal, and in Rome. His calm demeanour can also be attributed to a family that differed from many others in East Timor - including that of yesterday's fellow Nobel laureate, Jose Ramos Horta - in that there were no big rows over divided political loyalties.

An apparently conservative figure who has been compared to the late Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, Bishop Belo dismayed Jakarta soon after his appointment as the Apostolic Administrator in Dili, the East Timor capital, continuing the outspoken tone of Monsignor Martinho Costa Lopez, a nationalist who had been recalled by Rome after pressure from Jakarta.

Again and again, he has given refuge to youths being hunted by the Indonesians for their alleged part in demonstrations - notably those during the Pope's 1989 visit and negotiated to save them from torture and imprisonment. When he heard the news of the Santa Cruz massacre on November 12th, 1991, in which an estimated 270 mourners were "gunned down by troops, he rushed to the scene and helped survivors into his car to save them from execution.

He has used every opportunity to take East Timor's case to the international stage. In 1989, he appealed directly to the UN Secretary General saying: "We are dying as a people and as a nation." It took five years to get a reply.

Jose Ramos Horta, East Timor's "foreign minister in exile", is a sophisticated and determined diplomatic talent. He has worked tirelessly, from Australia, Portugal and the UN, to see a broken promise kept. In 1974 Indonesia's then, Foreign Minister, Mr Adam Malik, told him East Timor should be independent. As he was negotiating with Mr Malik, Indonesia's generals were planning the 1975 invasion.

Though both yesterday's Nobel Peace Prize laureates were raised in the hardly benign but certainly laissez faire atmosphere of Portuguese colonialism, the similarities end there. The awarding of the prize to them both - the pastoral and the political symbols of East Timorese nationalism - is a sign which Indonesia will find hard to dismiss.