Success Quote by Jose Ramos-Horta

“Working together” is doing diplomatic heavy lifting here: it’s an invitation, a warning, and a legitimacy strategy wrapped into one civic-sounding phrase. Jose Ramos-Horta isn’t pitching truth as a moral abstraction; he’s framing it as a joint construction, something that must be excavated with multiple hands because the ground itself has been tampered with. “Dig out” implies burial: facts deliberately covered, records missing, witnesses intimidated, narratives contested. The language makes truth forensic rather than philosophical, an artifact to be recovered from rubble.

The insistence on “the truth and nothing but the truth” borrows the courtroom’s ritual certainty, signaling that this is meant to be more than a symbolic commission. It’s also a hedge against the cynicism that usually greets official investigations: audiences in post-conflict societies know how easily “truth” becomes a negotiated settlement. Ramos-Horta tries to preempt that by anchoring the process in procedure and accountability.

“About what happened in ’99” is compressed context with explosive charge. In Timor-Leste, 1999 isn’t just a date; it’s the referendum, the violence, the displacement, the moment the international community both watched and intervened. Naming it as shorthand acknowledges collective trauma without re-litigating it in public.

The most politically astute move comes at the end: “institutional failings.” That phrase widens the target from individual perpetrators to systems, allowing a path to reform without requiring a single scapegoat to carry the entire burden. It also quietly indicts state and international actors alike, suggesting responsibility isn’t only personal; it’s structural.