Belo, Carlos Filipe Ximenes (1948-…), a Roman Catholic bishop from East Timor, in southeast Asia, won the 1996 Nobel Prize for peace for his efforts to bring peace to his homeland. He shared the prize with José Ramos-Horta, a fellow countryman who was fighting in exile for East Timor’s right to self-determination. See Ramos-Horta, José.
Belo was born on Feb. 3, 1948, in a remote village in East Timor, where his family had lived for many generations. As a young boy, he tended water buffalo in the fields around his village. He attended missionary schools in Baucau and Ossu and in 1973 graduated from the seminary outside Dili, the capital. He then moved to Lisbon, Portugal, eventually entering the Salesian religious order. He completed his studies at the Portuguese Catholic University in Lisbon and at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome. He was ordained as a priest in 1980. Belo returned to East Timor in 1981 as director of the Salesian College at Fatumaca, where he set in motion a modern teaching program.
Belo became the papal administrator for Dili in 1983, and effective head of the Roman Catholic Church for that region. The Vatican consecrated him as bishop in 1988. As the leader of the church in East Timor, Belo became an active defender of the human rights of his people against the military forces of Indonesia, which had invaded and annexed East Timor in 1975. In 1991, he risked his own safety after Indonesian security forces had massacred about 180 people in a funeral procession. Belo gave sanctuary to some of those who fled from the cemetery and then escorted them home. However, the security forces followed them, and many East Timorese were arrested and never seen again.
In a letter addressed to the United Nations, published in 1989, Belo stated his sympathy for the cause of East Timorese freedom from Indonesian control. He said that the only peaceful solution for East Timor would be respect for the right of the people to self-determination. Belo challenged the claims of the Indonesian government by saying that the East Timorese had never chosen to become a province of Indonesia.
In 1999, Indonesia ended its claim to East Timor following a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of the East Timorese voted for independence. East Timor became an independent country in 2002.
Belo resigned as papal administrator in East Timor in 2002, and later took a church position in Mozambique, in east Africa. In 2022, the Catholic Church revealed that Belo’s duties had been restricted as punishment for sexual abuse of children that he allegedly committed from the 1980’s onward.
See also East Timor; Timor.
