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View all search resultsFor Timor Leste president, ASEAN membership a lifelong dream
Ramos-Horta, 72, who left retirement this year to clinch the country’s presidency for a second time, told Reuters the dream was long-held.
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I
t was as a budding diplomat in the 1970s that Jose Ramos-Horta, a man who would go on to win the Nobel prize for his fight for East Timor’s independence, first raised the idea of his country joining Southeast Asia’s economic and political bloc.
Almost half a century later, his vision appears set to be realized, with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) announcing on Friday that it had agreed in principle to admit the sovereign country Timor-Leste, formerly called East Timor, as the group’s 11th member.
Ramos-Horta, 72, who left retirement this year to clinch the country’s presidency for a second time, told Reuters the dream was long-held.
“The very first time I talked about this I was only 24 or 25,” he said by telephone from the capital, Dili.
“I went to Jakarta and met with then-Indonesian foreign minister Adam Malik, and I had zero diplomatic experience but I knew that regional integration, a membership in ASEAN and a close relationship with Australia and Indonesia was very important to the future of Timor-Leste.”
At the time, East Timor was ruled by Portugal, although it was clear Lisbon would soon relinquish its colony. East Timor was later annexed by Indonesia and gained full independence only in 2002.
At a summit in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh this week, ASEAN said Timor-Leste would be granted observer status at high-level meetings of the bloc as it formulated a “roadmap for full membership”.
