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SINGAPORE: East Timor hopes to join the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (Asean) by 2012 but not as a “basket case” which
might embarrass Myanmar, President Jose Ramos-Horta said.
Addressing the Foreign Correspondents
Association here late Saturday, Ramos-Horta said his six-year-old
country was improving its economy and other institutions in order to
be ready to join the Southeast Asian grouping.
Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, joined Asean
in 1997 but has been a controversial member because of alleged human
rights violations, including the continued detention of democracy
icon Aung San Suu Kyi, and torture claims.
Myanmar’s ruling generals have also come under
fire for blocking urgent humanitarian relief to victims of Cyclone
Nargis, which devastated the Irrawaddy Delta region.
No Asean country is opposing East Timor’s
membership and its largest member, Indonesia, has assigned a senior
diplomat to help the young nation in its membership preparations,
Ramos-Horta said.
“I hope that by 2012 we can [join Asean],”
he told his audience of journalists and diplomats.
“We set this target as pressure on ourselves
to work harder in order to be eligible to join Asean, because
obviously Asean countries, with the embarrassing problems of
Burma/Myanmar, they wouldn’t want a basket case, an unstable new
member,” he added.
“So we have to work hard,” said the
58-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Ramos-Horta survived an assassination attempt in
February, underlining instability in the impoverished country with a
violent recent past.
East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, was
invaded by Indonesia in 1975 as it moved toward formal independence,
starting a brutal 24-year occupation.
The country won its freedom in a 1999 UN-backed
referendum that was marred by violence as Indonesian-backed militias
laid waste to much of the country in a scorched-earth campaign that
displaced hundreds of thousands.
The country gained formal independence in 2002.
East Timor also faces formidable economic
challenges despite massive reserves of oil and gas, analysts said.
The country is the least developed in Southeast
Asia, with around 50- percent unemployment and most of the
population surviving off subsistence farming.
It remains dependent on foreign assistance, with
its oil and gas industry still to be fully developed.
Ramos-Horta, a co-winner of the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1996 for championing East Timor’s struggle for
independence, meanwhile urged the International Criminal Court to
indict Myanmar’s military rulers for crimes against humanity.
But he continued to disagree with the United
States and other Western nations on the effectiveness of imposing
economic sanctions.
“If I were the prosecutor general of the
International Criminal Court, I will find substantive evidence to
start indicting them for crimes against humanity for what has been
happening over the last 20 years in Burma,” he said, referring to
Myanmar by its former name.
He added, however: “I always oppose sanctions
on impoverished countries and the sad thing is that powerful
countries mostly impose sanctions on the weaker countries with which
they don’t agree.”
Asean groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,
Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
-- AFP
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