Nobel laureate Jose Ramos-Horta blasts East Timor’s ‘total failure’ against extreme poverty
‘If I had been a prime minister for 10 years, I would have focused all those 10 years on quality education, on rural development and that means water and sanitation for the people’
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former East Timorese president Jose Ramos-Horta has waded back into the young country’s politics ahead of parliamentary elections next month, calling the government a total failure in the past decade in crucial areas such as reducing child malnutrition and providing clean water.
Ramos-Horta, joint recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize for efforts to bring independence and peace to East Timor, is not a candidate in the elections but has declared support for the Fretilin party, which led a short-lived minority government that collapsed at the start of this year.
The May 12 vote, East Timor’s second parliamentary election in less than a year, will pit a loose grouping of Fretilin and one minor party against a formal alliance of three parties led by the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction party of independence hero Xanana Gusmao, a giant in East Timor’s politics who was its first president, from 2002 to 2007, and prime minister from 2007 to 2015.
“If I had been a prime minister for 10 years, I would have focused all those 10 years on quality education, on rural development and that means water and sanitation for the people,” Ramos-Horta said.
“The study by the UN on our social economic indicators, particularly on malnutrition and children’s growth are extremely negative, I’d say total failure over the last 10 years,” he said.
