20 Quotes by Jose Ramos-Horta

As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.

Sometimes, a war saves people.

Working together, they will dig out the truth and nothing but the truth about what happened in '99, to assign responsibility, and to look at the institutional failings.

Such a structure would also raise a number of problems: first of all, which Timorese to pay compensation to? It would open a can of worms in terms of who was really a victim and who was not.

We do not have a budget support. We are now fully independent in terms of requirements, but we still have a need for development assistance separate from the budget. So all the economic aid we receive is for development assistance.

We do have some assistance from the World Bank but not from the IMF. We are not borrowing yet, but we are considering, in the future, borrowing from the Kuwait Fund to support our infrastructure development.

It would be a mind-boggling endeavor to try to identify each individual who claims to have been a survivor of victimization during this period of 24 years.

The East Timorese government does not believe that we should consider compensation for the victims because there are tens of thousands of people who were, in one way or another, affected by the violence either directly or indirectly.

The government can access these funds but only following approval by the parliament to support our budget requirements and investments in infrastructure development, education, public health, and so on.