Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 38

3 February 1948—

Protector of East Timor

Until less than a decade ago, the Southeastern Asian state of East Timor was a troubled country. A Portuguese colony from the sixteenth century until 1974, the tiny island enjoyed its status as a free state for only two years before it was invaded and annexed by Indonesia. Over the next quarter-century, the East Timorese endured a foreign occupation marked by indiscriminate killings—well over one hundred thousand—and destruction. The ferocity of the Indonesian occupation was fueled by religious differences. East Timor’s population is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, while Indonesia is a Muslim nation.

The rest of the world knew little and cared less about the turmoil in East Timor until the Roman Catholic Apostolic Administrator and later Bishop of Dili, the nation’s capital, demanded that it take notice. He was Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, a Salesian priest who had trained in Portugal and Rome before returning to his native land. Belo’s appointment was approved by Indonesian governmental authorities because they thought he would be timid and pliable. They were mistaken.

In 1983, Belo’s first year in office, Indonesian military forces on the lookout for Timorese resistance fighters swept over the village of Kraras. When they departed, they left behind three hundred dead villagers. The Sunday following the massacre, Belo delivered an impassioned sermon in Dili Cathedral denouncing the atrocities, appealing to the Indonesian occupiers to restrain themselves, and calling on the international community to intervene in the name of justice. Immediately after the sermon, he began initiating as much contact with the outside world as he could, reaching out to dozens of journalists, human rights activists, diplomats, and political and religious leaders, in the hope of bringing East Timor’s plight to their attention.

Belo advocated nonviolent but firm resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and was tireless in his public denunciations of the torture, imprisonment, execution, and disappearance of East Timorese citizens. His work on behalf of his countrymen enraged the Indonesians, putting Belo himself at risk of assassination or disappearance. Conservative elements in the Roman Catholic Church also criticized him for using his position as the nation’s religious leader to speak out against political injustice. But Belo saw no conflict of interest between his commitments to Christ and his advocacy for the East Timorese people, whom he described as “dying” under the Indonesian occupation.

Belo’s commitment to nonviolent change, his persistence in denouncing atrocities, and his efforts to draw the world’s attention to East Timor finally paid off. Bowing to international pressure, Indonesia surrendered its claims to Belo’s country, and the newly independent East Timor elected its first president in 2002. Belo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, resigned his bishopric and traveled to Mozambique, where he remains today as a missionary.