International Herald Tribune Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Regarding "The case for going to war" (Views, Feb. 26) by Jose Ramos-Horta: . It is painful to see a Nobel Peace Prize winner supporting any war, particularly one as unjustified as the impending United States war on Iraq. Jose Ramos-Horta, the foreign minister of East Timor, claims to know what it means to suffer from foreign invasion and yet prescribes the same for the Iraqi people. . Ramos-Horta should know that the U.S. war on Iraq, despite all its pretensions, is not about Saddam Hussein. The United States never went to war against the dictator Suharto in all the 35 years of his despotic rule which saw him killing hundreds of thousands of his own people, assassinating political dissidents, invading his neighbor East Timor - all actions similar to what Saddam has done. Suharto, like Saddam till the late eighties, was protected and supported by the United States. . What Ramos-Horta forgets is that it was the removal of Suharto from power through mass protests in Indonesia that paved the way for East Timorese independence. If Suharto were still ruling then Ramos-Horta would have been most likely taking part in anti-U.S. demonstrations and not trying to curry favor with the United States. . Sathien Narai,Bangkok Tension with North Korea .

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