Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Guterres called President Bill Clinton from Lisbon on August 30 and September 8, 1999, to discuss the growing crisis in East Timor.
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Guterres → call → Timor
The small Southeast Asian territory, which had endured a brutal Indonesian occupation since 1975, was again engulfed in violence after voters overwhelmingly chose independence in a referendum.
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voters → endure → referendum
Pro-Indonesian militias responded to the vote for independence by unleashing a so-called "scorched-earth" campaign, destroying infrastructure, displacing up to half a million people and killing thousands.
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militias → respond → thousands
The crisis resonated in Portugal, where linguistic, Catholic, and historical ties to its former colony helped fuel a solidarity movement.
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ties → resonate → movement
An estimated 10,000 demonstrators, dressed in white, formed human chains through Lisbon’s city streets.
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demonstrators → dress → streets
Guterres had raised the issue before.
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Guterres → raise → issue
At a 1996 summit in Bangkok, he met Indonesia’s President Suharto and broached the politically sensitive topic of East Timor, offering to restore diplomatic relations (severed since the 1975 invasion) in exchange for the release of Timorese resistance leader Xanana Gusmao.
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he → meet → Gusmao
The proposal was met with an awkward silence.
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proposal → meet → silence
This time, Guterres was asking the United States to support a UN mission in East Timor, but Washington was reluctant to confront Indonesia.
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Washington → ask → Indonesia
Guterres recalled in his 2022 biography, “Honest Broker”, that he warned Clinton during the second call that Portugal could reconsider its Balkan deployments if the international community failed to intervene.
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community → recall → deployments
Portugal’s contribution to NATO was small but politically well-placed, with its troops serving in the alliance’s prominent post-Cold War missions in Bosnia and Kosovo.
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troops → place → Bosnia
Guterres offered Clinton a choice: risk a public falling-out with a founding NATO ally, or use Washington’s influence to make Indonesia accept an international force in East Timor.
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Indonesia → offer → Timor
The next day, amid growing international pressure, the White House stated that Indonesia “must” allow international assistance.
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Indonesia → grow → assistance
For Guterres, it was an early test of multilateral crisis diplomacy, a skill set he would later bring to his post as UN secretary-general in 2017.
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he → bring → 2017
East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, finally won its freedom in 2002.
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Timor → know → 2002
For spearheading diplomatic efforts during the 1999 crisis, Guterres was awarded Timorese citizenship in 2024.
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Guterres → spearhead → 2024
“Antonio Guterres pushed a lot for what we now call the referendum, and when violence broke out he was one of the people calling for a UN intervention,” said Christine Cabasset, a teacher at Lille Catholic University and an expert on East Timor, reflecting on how the East Timor crisis foreshadowed Guterres’s later career.
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crisis → push → career
“Guterres had a critical role all along the way,” she added, noting how he later pushed for the creation of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor.
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he → have → Timor
“There is also a kind of love story with the UN, I mean, that strong link between Timor-Leste and the UN…
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I → be → Leste
And Guterres [himself] became very important in the UN starting from 2005.”
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Guterres → become → 2005
Guterres’s response to the East Timor crisis reflected an approach shaped by his Catholic faith, his early work with Portugal’s poor and his political coming of age after the fall of a dictatorship.
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response → reflect → dictatorship
He carried those experiences into a career built on finding common ground and helping people caught in crises.
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He → carry → crises
But as UN secretary-general, he has faced the limits of that approach, struggling to turn appeals for peace into action when the world’s most powerful countries are at odds.
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countries → face → odds
A revolution of flowers
Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres was born in Lisbon on April 30, 1949, to Ilda Candida de Oliveira Guterres and Virgilio Dias Guterres, a senior employee of the Lisbon gas and electricity company.
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Guterres → bear → company
He spent summers and extended periods in the countryside with his grandparents in the small village of Donas.
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He → spend → Donas
His childhood friend Vitor Dias told the newspaper Publico that Guterres’s grandmother stressed the importance of education and by “three or four years old, he already knew how to write his name.”
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he → tell → name
The grandparents’ house was right next to the church where “Little Toni” often served as an altar boy.
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Toni → serve → boy
Portugal was then under the rule of dictator Antonio Salazar, whose Estado Novo regime closely resembled Italian fascism, but with less emphasis on brute force, personality cults and revolutionary zeal, and more on Catholic conservatism.
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regime → resemble → conservatism
As a result, the country was politically and culturally cut off from much of democratic Western Europe.
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country → cut → Europe
“As dictator, [Salazar] was very much marked by corporatism, the idea of an organic society without conflict and also by Roman Catholic conservative values,” said Antonio Costa Pinto, a historian at the University of Lisbon.
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Pinto → mark → Lisbon
“But especially in the late 60s and early 70s … it basically became a Cold War dictatorship, an anti-communist one.”
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it → become → 60s
Among the regime’s core beliefs was that the seafaring Portuguese were innately suited to colonialism and it stubbornly clung to the centuries-old Portuguese empire, fighting bloody rebellions in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.
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it → seafare → Angola
“We were a very closed country.
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We → close → ?
We had censorship everywhere.
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We → have → censorship
We had the political police,” remembered Joao Goulao, a retired Portuguese doctor who grew up in that era.
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who → have → era
“There was a very limited mobility of citizens; we were not able to travel abroad without a lot of formalities.
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we → be → formalities
We were not a very sexy destination for tourism, so people didn’t come to us and we were very isolated.
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we → come → us
Still, Portugal was a founding member of NATO, a US ally and a participant in Western economic institutions.
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Portugal → found → institutions
“In the late 60s especially, there was a huge contradiction between the type of censorship and the type of values – very conservative – supported by the dictatorship and the structure of Portuguese society that was already much more modern,” said Costa Pinto.
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Pinto → be → society
Portuguese citizens saw those contradictions in everyday life: Coca-Cola was banned from being made in Portugal, and until 1970, anyone who owned a cigarette lighter needed an annual licence — a regulation imposed to protect the national match industry.
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who → see → industry
…and 227 more, not listed.
The Aporia
