Leadership Quote by Jose Ramos-Horta

Ramos-Horta’s line has the cool, procedural cadence of someone who’s spent decades watching noble principles collide with the machinery of state. On the surface, he’s talking about compensation. Underneath, he’s naming a political nightmare: the moment a new nation tries to translate moral harm into a ledger, every category becomes contested and every payment becomes an argument about history itself.

The phrase “which Timorese to pay” does a lot of quiet work. It frames the population not as a unified body wronged by violence, but as a set of claimants whose legitimacy must be sorted, ranked, verified. That’s not callousness so much as an acknowledgment that post-conflict justice isn’t only about righting wrongs; it’s about deciding who gets to be officially recognized as wronged. Recognition is power. It determines who is seen, who is heard, who is owed.

“Can of worms” is blunt, almost deliberately unromantic. It signals the fear that reparations could become a proxy battlefield: collaborators versus resisters, city versus countryside, those harmed directly versus those displaced indirectly, families of the dead versus survivors living with trauma. In a place like Timor-Leste, where the struggle for independence involved occupation, internal fractures, and contested narratives of heroism and complicity, compensation risks hardening identity into paperwork.

The intent, then, isn’t to deny victimhood but to warn that a well-meaning structure can destabilize fragile social cohesion. He’s gesturing at a common post-liberation paradox: the state needs closure, but the people need acknowledgment - and those needs don’t always align.