Gold Star Mothers’ DayTimor-Leste Elections: Lessons For US Media & Policy-Makers

The Moderate Voice
Sunday, May 13th, 2007
By Swaraaj Chauhan

The US media’s/bloggers’ obsession with things/issues American is an old and familiar story. Some say that the US media projected Mr George W. Bush in such a way during the initial stages of Iraq war, that even the US president was led to have faith in his own rhetoric! …And the rest is history.

The first Persian Gulf War in 1990 changed the character and complexion of the, by and large, free and fair American media to a great extent…And now the media is finding it difficult to get out of that ‘embedded’ journalism mindset/syndrome. This is a subject for another post some other time.

Let me return to this present post. It never hurts to have a look at the world beyond the American shores, especially when some very distinguished persons in other countries become heads of state under very trying circumstances - for example in Timor-Leste.

And there may be something for us all to learn from such countries.

Timor-Leste… What…???

This week, with UN troops and police patrolling the streets, this tiny nation in Southeast Asia of fewer than 1 million people elected José Ramos-Horta, a Nobel peace laureate, as their President in a peaceful manner.

Ramos-Horta is the founder of East Timor’s independence movement and spent 24 years in exile after Indonesia invaded his country, earlier known as East Timor. A former journalist, fluent in five languages, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.

“Last May, Timor-Leste descended into violence as its police and army collapsed, prompting the hasty dispatch of a UN peacekeeping force,” reports The Economist.

“On Friday May 11th, 2007, the election commission announced that José Ramos-Horta had won a landslide victory over Francisco Guterres, a former guerrilla running under his nom-de-guerre, ‘Lu-Olo’.

“The result, with Mr Ramos-Horta getting 69% to his rival’s 31%, is a crushing defeat for Mr Guterres’s Fretilin party, the resistance movement’s political wing which has governed the country since it gained full independence five years ago.

“It will indeed be a considerable challenge to soothe the bitterness between Timor-Leste’s political factions and end the sporadic clashes between street gangs loosely associated with them. Only then will the tens of thousands who have been living miserably in refugee camps since last year’s violence feel safe to return home. Now is Mr Ramos-Horta’s chance to really earn that Nobel peace prize.”

Please click here to read more…

…

So Timor-Leste shows that it helps to enlist the support of the United Nations and the comity of nations when the challenges are rather huge when dealing with any country…And it is obvious which country I am referring to here!

The most important lesson is that puppets planted by foreign powers can never run a nation for long. Hence the need to search, and encourage, local leaders with credibility, and capability, to take charge.