Leadership Quote by Jose Ramos-Horta

“Mind-boggling endeavor” is bureaucratese doing moral heavy lifting. Jose Ramos-Horta isn’t just describing an administrative problem; he’s quietly indicting the scale of violence that made normal accounting impossible. In one sentence, the language toggles between the cold tools of governance (identification, periodization, verification) and a reality so vast those tools collapse. The effect is strategic: it frames suffering as both undeniable and uncontainable, pushing back against the common post-conflict demand that legitimacy must be earned through perfect documentation.

The subtext is aimed at skeptics and institutions. After long occupations and counterinsurgencies, survivors are often forced into an evidentiary maze: prove you were harmed, prove you qualify, prove you’re not exaggerating. Ramos-Horta’s phrasing anticipates that courtroom logic and disarms it. By emphasizing the 24-year span, he turns time into a weapon wielded against truth itself: decades of displacement, disappeared records, mass fear, coerced silence. Who is left to “identify” whom?

Politically, it’s also an argument for collective recognition over individual casework. That can read as compassionate - a refusal to make trauma compete for paperwork - and as pragmatic, even defensive: the state and the international community may never be able to deliver tidy justice, so they must accept a messier moral ledger. The line works because it sounds like a procedural aside while actually demanding a sweeping conclusion: when victimization is this widespread, denial becomes the only truly “mind-boggling” position.