Politics & Power Quote by Jose Ramos-Horta

A young state is revealing what it can’t afford to admit: that justice, once translated into budgets and bureaucracy, becomes terrifyingly literal. Jose Ramos-Horta’s line is framed as pragmatic triage, but it carries a colder implication: when suffering is widespread, the safest political move is to declare it administratively uncountable.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Does not believe” softens what is essentially a refusal, shifting the decision from policy to principle, as if compensation were a philosophical mistake rather than a financial and political liability. “Consider compensation” is similarly evasive; it’s not “deny,” it’s “not consider,” the language of doors left technically unlocked while being firmly shut. Then comes the central maneuver: the scale of harm (“tens of thousands”) is offered not as a moral argument for repair, but as a reason repair is impossible. Mass victimhood becomes a kind of veto.

The subtext is about state capacity and social cohesion. East Timor emerged from Indonesian occupation and the 1999 violence with fragile institutions, limited revenue, and competing demands: rebuilding, securing legitimacy, avoiding grievance hierarchies that could fracture a new national story. Compensation risks setting off disputes over eligibility, quantifying trauma, and privileging some losses over others. Ramos-Horta is signaling a preference for collective recovery over individualized redress - and, just as pointedly, shielding the government from an obligation it cannot meet without disappointing almost everyone.

It’s also a quiet warning about how nations launder catastrophe into “indirect” impact, turning accountability into an accounting problem.