Timor-Leste

Rebel with a cause

Having spent long hours protesting outside embassies, sitting inside the ambassador’s office of the Embassy of Timor-Leste must feel somewhat surreal for Joaquim da Fonseca, the country’s first-ever Ambassador to the UK.

“I was part of a banned underground movement fighting for Timor-Leste’s independence from Indonesia,” explains Da Fonseca.

The conflict claimed the lives of around 200,000 people, including three of the Ambassador’s brothers, and very nearly his own.

While supporting self-determination for the Timorese was not official policy for many governments, the Ambassador remains grateful to civil society groups in the UK (and elsewhere), who rallied to their aid.

Later the British government stepped up, “at a critical moment,” he adds. “After the referendum, our leader [Xanana Gusmao] was still under house arrest but Britain stepped in to offer him asylum.” Today there is a Xanana room at the British Embassy in Jakarta in honour of the independence hero.

The support offered by civil society groups during the liberation struggle and in the nation-building process after independence left an abiding impression on the Ambassador. When he was appointed as the adviser on civil society to Timor-Leste’s Prime Minister (2007-09), he made it a priority to include civil society in policy making.

Human Rights work is also a recurring theme in Da Fonseca’s career, who was the Prime Minister’s human rights adviser (2006-07). He arrives in London after a four-year posting in Geneva where much of his work concentrated on the UN’s Human Rights Council.

Escaping death
In fact, the Ambassador probably owes his life to the courage of human rights workers. Around the time of the independence referendum in 1999, he worked for the Human Rights Advocacy Division on voter education and reporting on human rights violations.

The premises of the organisation was attacked by militias and had it not been for two foreign human rights workers who refused to be taken to a safe haven unless their Timorese colleagues were also offered protection, the Ambassador and his other Timorese colleagues would almost certainly have been murdered.

But he survived and so did his reports. These were used in Timor-Leste’s truth and reconciliation process, which Da Fonseca says has been essential for the country’s healing: “We are a small society, we cannot afford to tiptoe around each other. We need to forgive each other. We also share an island with Indonesia so we need to live peacefully together.”

It’s not just about geography, he adds. “Timor-Leste wants to build a relationship of friendship and cooperation with our neighbour to benefit both countries and peoples.”

Here in London he will be seeking to deepen and widen Timor Leste’s existing bonds of friendship with Britain, which is helping the new nation evolve.

“It’s challenging to move from a liberation organisation to a government,” he smiles. In training officials in public administration, Britain has helped to bridge the skills deficit. The Ambassador himself studied at the LSE and four ministers in the current Government have studied in the UK.

The coalition government elected last year will be investing in human capital, says Da Fonseca, who wants to extend the academic ties with Britain. He also hopes to engage with the Timorese diaspora to encourage them to invest in their home country.

British investors are also welcome, he adds, in every sector, from oil and gas and energy to tourism and infrastructure. “The little infrastructure we had was destroyed. Now we have projects in place to develop ports, airports, highways, good roads.”

Defining the borders
Timor-Leste is blessed with offshore oil reserves, although the government is conscious this is a finite resource and so the country now has its own oil fund.

However, just how much oil the country is entitled to exploit is still to be ascertained. There is a disagreement over the interpretation of the Timor Sea Treaty signed in 2002 with their large southern neighbour, Australia. The Treaty serves as a provisional arrangement for the sharing of benefits from exploration of oil and gas wealth in the Timor Sea, in the absence of a permanent seabed delimitation between the two countries.

The dispute has now been taken to the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague, where the Ambassador is acting as the Agent for Timor-Leste. “This case is important on two fronts,” explains the Ambassador. “Oil is one of the main resources which we are relying on for the development of our country so we must ascertain what is ours.”

“The second issue relates to sovereignty. Many Timorese feel the liberation of the country will only be completed when we have delimited the permanent border.”

Being part of London’s large diplomatic hub, Da Fonseca is under no illusions that Timor-Leste is a small fish in a big pond, but as an enthusiastic angler, he also knows that little fish in a shoal have a better chance for survival.

So an important foreign policy goal that he will be working on will be for Timor-Leste to join the Commonwealth, to connect with nations who share the values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

Being part of the club will also facilitate Timor Leste’s global integration, he adds. “We are so small and far away and we want to make friends.”a

Elizabeth Stewart, the editor of Embassy Magazine interviewed the Ambassador of Timor Leste on 18 February