Dr Ramos-Horta Reacts to US Travel Warning to Timor Leste

Timor-Leste's Senior Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr José Ramos-Horta comments on the US State Department Travel Advice on Timor-Leste.

The US Travel Advices are usually based on US well-known faulty intelligence. Actually the US has no intelligence gathering facilities in Timor-Leste. Often they rely on other sources, such as Australian. And we all know how criminality in Australia and in the US is far higher than in Timor-Leste. So I find these so-called travel advices by Australia and the US mostly faulty, baseless and politically motivated to cover their backs because of previous intelligence failures elsewhere.

The US and other Western countries have a far higher level of violence, organized crime and gangs, racist and supremacist groups, with rampant proliferation of weapons, including in the hands of students and house wives, making them far more dangerous than poor developing countries like Timor-Leste that always fall victim to Western countries stereotypes.

Timor-Leste is very safe with very low level of criminal or political violence, without any trace of the presence of extremist terrorist groups.