EAST TIMOR NOBEL LAUREATE......
A CONNECTION....

Jose Ramos-Horta, the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner from East Timor, was a guest speaker at a conference held in San Francisco in June 1997, with the Dalai Lama. Ramos-Horta, who is Catholic, was among 100 writers, community organisers and political activists sharing the stage with the Dalai Lama at the event, titled "Peacemaking; The Power of Non-Violence". The conference was sponsored by Tibet House of New York, and co-sponsored by the Californian Institute of Integral Studies.

In seven public appearances, addressing several thousand people, Jose Ramos-Horta talked in depth, and lovingly, about the Jewish people. Twice a day the Dalai Lama, with Ramos-Horta and Guatemalan activist Anita Menchu, the sister of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu, regaled audiences with lessons on peacemaking, forgiveness and strategies for global rebuilding.

For two decades, Ramos-Horta has led a campaign against the Indonesian government, which invaded his country in 1976. Three of his brothers and a sister have perished in the conflict.The activist said he has a very personal connection with Jewish culture. Citing Jewish roots that date back hundreds of years, he said members of his family were victims of the inquisition.

"With a native Timorese mother and a Portuguese father, I can trace back my Jewish background to the period when Jews were forced to convert to Christianity.

My name is a very typical Jewish name in Portugal, "he said. "But even before I knew that I had some Jewish background, I was fascinated by Jewish history. If only people were to read Jewish history, and read about its culture, its creative thinking, its contribution to humanity, they would see that (Jews) are extraordinary people. Sometimes I wonder if there has been any nation in human history that has been so persecuted and humiliated and then finally threatened (with) its very extinction . Humanity should be ashamed of what was done to the Jews."

When asked why he linked the Jewish experience to current problems in East Timor, ( and other countries) he said that we are all part of one race, suffering and tragedies of people belong to all of us.

In one of his final talks at the conference, Jose Ramos-Horta told how, in the summer of 1940, thousands of desperate refugees lined up outside the Portuguese embassy in Bordeaux, France, hoping to see Consul General Aristides de Sousa Mendes.

Although the Portuguese Ministry forbade the issuing of visas to the refugees, the consul did not turn them away. At the time, Portugal was a so called neutral country; like Spain and Switzerland..... though neutral, profiteering from the war. He went on to explain that after the war, the consul was fired.

He explained how he always had an instinct for the underdog, for the oppressed, of his admiration for the Jews, because for too long they were the underdog and oppressed. They resurrected and survived and not too many people can frighten or threaten them today, after being persecuted for 2,000 years. He asked that we must speak out against racism, and anti-Judaism.

I wish him success in gaining freedom for Timor.

E-mail: Rufina Bernardetti Silva Mausenbaum