East Timor slams ‘selfish rivalries’, calls for US-China partnership for peace at Shangri-La Dialogue

Name: Vietnam suffers through its highest ever temperature as heatwave grips Southeast Asia
Uploaded: 2023-06-06T03:30:11.000Z
Duration: 1 min 43 s
Description: Vietnam suffers through its highest ever temperature as heatwave grips Southeast Asia

President José Ramos-Horta told a Singapore defence summit that rich nations must do more to ease inequality and stop squandering aid money

In the USSR’s absence, China has become ‘a magnet for disillusion with the West’, he said, as he pitched anew for his country’s full Asean membership

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Nobel laureate José Ramos-Horta, two-time president of East Timor, stands to deliver his speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore on Sunday. Photo: EPA-EFE

Su-Lin Tanin Singapore

Published: 11:30am, 6 Jun 2023Updated: 12:19pm, 6 Jun 2023

In what was one of the impassioned speeches made at the weekend’s Shangri-La Dialogue defence summit, East Timor’s President José Ramos-Horta called on the global rich to eradicate wealth inequality and proposed a “US-China partnership” for peace on the Korean peninsula and in the wider region.

Speaking at the final plenary on Sunday, the Nobel Peace Prize winner said there was also a “convenient tunnel vision” of China as a threat.

“Hard power tools available to the mightily rich of the world are not lawfully applied because the powers that could make a difference between war and peace are too busy squandering resources in narrow, selfish rivalries, each bent on regional influence and supremacy,” he said.

Those who claimed an “entitlement to a place of honour” in the United Nations’ Security Council, G7 and G20 groupings had also not shown leadership in tackling the world’s problems such as poverty and the climate crisis, he said.

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Vietnam suffers through its highest ever temperature as heatwave grips Southeast Asia

The rich had rescued exposed banks during the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 and poured money into the Ukraine war but refused to write off the debts of critically impoverished countries, he added.