Nobel prize winner on brink of victory in East Timor

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1763993.ece
Richard LLoyd Parry, Asia Editor

José Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, was poised to become the next President of East Timor as a tense second round of voting took place yesterday in Asia’s newest nation.

Political leaders appealed for calm after complaints from supporters of Dr Ramos-Horta’s opponent, Francisco Guterres, a former guerrilla fighter. They have accused Australian peace-keepers of intimidating his supporters to help the campaign of Dr Ramos-Horta.

“We would like to instil, particularly in our young people, the feeling that violence in our country will never again happen as we establish conditions for tolerance, peace and stability,” the outgoing President, Xanana Gusmão, a hero of the 23-year resistance war against East Timor’s former occupier, Indonesia, said.

“East Timor is a sovereign country, no longer under foreign military occupation,” Jose Teixeira, the country’s Energy Minister and a senior figure in Mr Guterres’s ruling Fretilin party, said this week. “The ISF (the Australian-led International Stabilisation Force) should not be frightening and intimidating an entirely peaceful election gathering.”

Mr Guterres came out on top in the first round of voting last month with 28 per cent, but in a field of eight candidates he failed to secure the necessary majority of more than 50 per cent. Dr Ramos-Horta won only 22 per cent but has become the strong favourite after five other defeated candidates gave him their second-round support.

The election has taken place in an atmosphere of anxiety and confrontation, only five years after formal independence, and seven years since the brutal occupation by Indonesia ended. Throughout the presidential campaign, supporters of the rival candidates have fought one another with machetes, stones and homemade darts fired from slings.

The candidates facing off yesterday could hardly be more different. Mr Guterres spent the Indonesian occupation living off snakes and deer in the Timorese mountains. His party, Fretilin, has its ideological origins in Third World Marxist-Leninism, and has insisted on saving the income from East Timor’s offshore oil fields for future generations.

Dr Ramos-Horta is a suave cosmopolitan, a friend of foreign leaders and film stars, who won the Nobel prize for his campaign in exile for Timorese independence. He is the acting prime minister and has the support of President Gusmão, who intends to swap jobs with him by standing for election as prime minister in parliamentary elections next month.