Exclusive | ‘I don’t care about the big power rivalries,’ East Timor leader says (2024)

East Timor is not caught up in the rivalry between China and the United States and it will not take a side, President Jose Ramos-Horta said.

In an exclusive interview, he said Dili had “exceptionally good” relations with both powers “as we do with Australia, with Indonesia, with India, and so on”.

Ramos-Horta also dismissed concerns over military cooperation between China and East Timor, also known as Timor Leste.

“The irony is the country with a military presence in Timor Leste is not China, it is Australia, the United States and Portugal – three Western countries,” the 74-year-old Nobel laureate said on Tuesday on the sidelines of a state visit to Beijing.

After upgrading diplomatic ties in September, China and East Timor have agreed to step up cooperation on everything from infrastructure, agriculture and trade to reducing poverty, according to a joint statement released after Ramos-Horta met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Monday.

The two sides also pledged to “closely interact at all levels in the military and police departments and to strengthen cooperation in such areas as personnel training, equipment and technology, joint exercises and training, police and law enforcement security”.

Ramos-Horta, the island nation’s fifth president since it gained independence in 2002, said one potential area for military cooperation could be training East Timorese army engineers, though this had not yet been discussed.

“That would be the nature of the training, to equip our army to be able to assist in natural disasters in our own country, in doing what the US Navy Seabees [the construction battalions] have been doing – building schools, fixing schools, building clinics, fixing clinics and roads,” he said.

As the leader of Asia’s youngest nation, Ramos-Horta said his priority for cooperation with China would be development sectors like health, education and agriculture to help tackle the extreme poverty, malnutrition, water and sanitation issues in East Timor.

“If China is to deliver to us in five years free of extreme poverty, free of child malnutrition, stunting, and resolve the challenges of fresh clean water sanitation, I will be eternally, eternally grateful because I don’t care about the big power rivalries – I care about the simple people,” he said.

“If China can help our simple people, then China is my hero.”

Once a Portuguese colony, East Timor declared independence in 1975 but was invaded by Indonesia nine days later.

East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence in 1999 in a referendum supervised by the United Nations. After a wave of violence by the Indonesian military and its supporters and a three-year UN mission, East Timor became independent in 2002.

East Timor – which sits between Southeast Asia and Oceania – has made substantial economic progress since then, largely from oil and gas revenue, but it is still a “least developed country” and continues to grapple with issues such as food insecurity and a lack of infrastructure.

Meanwhile, ties with Indonesia have significantly improved and in 2018 East Timor signed a historic agreement with Australia to draw a median line as a permanent boundary in the Timor Sea, ending a decade-long dispute between the neighbours over rights to the sea’s rich oil and gas reserves.

Under the treaty, East Timor also receives at least 70 per cent of royalty revenue from the Greater Sunrise field – the largest known petroleum resource in the Timor Sea. Previously, revenue was to be split evenly between the two countries.

On Tuesday, Ramos-Horta said the agreement between East Timor and Australia could provide inspiration for resolving the maritime disputes in the South China Sea, where tensions are soaring between rival claimants, particularly China and the Philippines.

Beijing’s sweeping territorial claims in the resource-rich South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes, overlap with those of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations – which East Timor is expected to join next year – is in talks with China over a code of conduct for the waterway, but progress has been slow.

Ramos-Horta said differences should be resolved through bilateral conversation between the claimant states, and countries outside the region should not step in.

“The countries bordering the South China Sea are the custodians of the South China Sea – not any other extra regional power,” he said. “So they are the custodians of what is at the surface and what is underground and they have the responsibility to refrain from acts of threat and coercion.”

He said the rival claimants would have to make concessions if solutions are to be found.

“Win-win is very difficult to have a 100 per cent win,” Ramos-Horta said. “And win-win means to be prepared to make concessions so that there’s a regime that governs the South China Sea that is accepted by all.”