Ramos-Horta, José Manuel (1949– )

Timorese freedom fighter and politician, prime minister of East Timor, president from 2007. After Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975, living in exile, he became permanent representative to the United Nations (UN) for Fretilin (Frente Revolucionária do Timor Leste Independente; Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor), the nationalist movement that had briefly governed the country in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1996 with Timorese Bishop Carlos Belo. In 1998, he resigned from Fretilin to become an independent politician. After returning to East Timor in 1999, Horta was appointed foreign minister in late 2000, under the UN Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET) that was put in place to help pave the way to statehood. He remained foreign minister after independence in 2002 and in June 2006 became prime minister. In May 2007 he succeeded Xanana Gusmão as president, defeating the Fretilin candidate Francisco Guterres by a landslide margin.

From 1970 to 1971 he was exiled to Mozambique for ‘subversive activities’ against the Portuguese colonial regime. In 1974, he was a founding member of the left-wing nationalist Fretilin, which fought for East Timor's independence from Portugal. He returned to briefly become minister of external relations and information in the provisional government after East Timor secured independence from Portugal in November 2005. This government was overthrown by Indonesia's illegal invasion and annexation of East Timor in December 1975. Horta fled three days before the Indonesian invasion, and from exile he drew the UN's attention to the annexation, causing the UN Security Council to condemn the invasion outright. From bases in Australia and the USA, he travelled the world for more than two decades, until Indonesia's withdrawal after the August 1999 vote for independence, to raise international awareness about Indonesia's activities and lobby for a free East Timor. Despite being nominated by the UN for the presidency of the East Timor National Council (ETNC), the interim legislature appointed by UNTAET, he lost the April 2001 election to the independence campaigner Manuel Carrascalao.

The son of a Portuguese father, who had been exiled to Portuguese Timor by Portugal's Salazar dictatorship, and a Timorese mother, Ramos-Horta was born in Dili and educated in a Catholic mission in the village of Soibada. Between 1969 and 1974 he was a radio and television correspondent. Four of his 11 brothers and sisters were killed in the struggle between Fretilin and the Indonesian military from 1975. Later, in the 1980s he studied at the Hague Academy of International Law, received a master's degree in peace studies from Antioch University, California, and a Fellowship in International Relations at St Antony's College, Oxford, England. During his time in exile 1975–99 he lived and worked in the USA, Portugal, Britain, the Netherlands, and Australia and was the representative of the imprisoned resistance leader Xanana Gusmão, until the latter's release in 1999.

His diplomatic experiences are recounted in his book Funu: The Unfinished Saga of East Timor (1987).