ETimor president criticises response after assassination bid
SYDNEY (AFP) — East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta has criticised the response of international forces as he lay bleeding in the road for 30 minutes after being shot outside his home last month.
In his first full interviews since he was critically wounded in the assassination attempt, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate described the chaotic events from the moment he locked eyes with the rebel gunman.
"I could see from the face and eyes of one of (rebel leader Alfredo) Reinado's men that he was going to shoot me," Ramos-Horta told The Sydney Morning Herald in an interview published Friday.
"I turned around. It was at that moment that he fired at least two shots, hitting me on the right side of the back.
"If I had not turned at that moment, he would have shot me right in the chest. I would have died immediately."
Ramos-Horta said he was told that United Nations police had obstructed people trying to rescue him as he lay bleeding near the front gate of his house in the capital Dili on February 11.
"I was shouting for an ambulance," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "My security people in the meantime had arrived, and it took so long for an ambulance to arrive.
"It was a battered ambulance without a paramedic, only the driver. Fortunately a Portuguese paramedic jumped into our ambulance."
The president, who is recuperating in Darwin after being discharged from hospital in the northern Australian city, accused international peacekeeping forces in the country of not acting quickly enough to stop the rebels' escape.
"I would say that the Australian-led forces could have promptly surrounded the entire town closing all the exits, using helicopters, sending immediately elements to my house to get the information on the ground," he said.
"They would have captured them within hours."
Reinado was killed during the attack and eight rebels have surrendered, while East Timor's military and police, with help from the Australian-led international stabilisation force, are pursuing others.
International forces were sent to East Timor after friction erupted in 2006 between army and police factions following a military desertion that led to an increase in street violence, leaving 37 people dead.
Australian Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said Ramos-Horta's comments about Australian-led forces should be seen in context.
"He was complimentary in every way," he told ABC radio. "He made a very, very important point, and that is that we don't act independently, we act at the request of the sovereign government of East Timor or the United Nations.
"He did make a suggestion that we could have moved faster to cordon off the city and to rein in the rebels, but you've got to have a close look at the timing of it all.
"Of course the President was in no position really at the time to properly judge the timing," Fitzgibbon said.
