Timor-Leste’s leader floats idea of retired South-east Asia general to guide Myanmar peace talks

SINGAPORE – Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta has a rather unusual fix for Myanmar’s long-running civil war: Put a retired South-east Asian four-star general in charge of guiding the country’s warring sides “under a tent” to seek a humanitarian solution.

“They all need to come together – the Tatmadaw, all the leaders of the ethnic armies, and the democratic opposition – under a tent, with no pre-conditions, no agenda,” said Mr Ramos-Horta, in response to a question from the audience following his address to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. Tatmadaw is the local term for Myanmar’s armed forces.

“All of this could be guided by a prominent South-east Asian individual – I would say a four-star general, a retired four-star general,” the Nobel Peace Prize winner proposed. Such a move would alleviate the human suffering in Myanmar, including by “allowing unrestricted access by humanitarian agencies”, he said.

The proposal comes as ASEAN’s newest member state is itself embroiled in a bilateral dispute with Myanmar, which in February ordered the head of Timor-Leste’s diplomatic mission in Naypyitaw to leave the country.

The diplomatic row was sparked by a criminal complaint filed with Timor-Leste’s justice department by Myanmar’s Chin Human Rights Organization (CHRO) against the Myanmar military.

The rights group filed the complaint in Timor-Leste as it was seeking an ASEAN member state with an independent judiciary, as well as a country that would be sympathetic to Chin state’s majority Christian population, Reuters quoted CHRO executive director Salai Za Uk as saying.

In his speech, Mr Ramos-Horta called the Myanmar civil war “a stain on ASEAN’s otherwise impressive catalogue of successes”.

“It is a war of exhaustion, ruining the whole country, the economy and the people. Ordinary people, farmers, students, youth – they are the ones suffering,” he added.

Timor-Leste became ASEAN’s 11th member on Oct 26, 2025. The island nation of 1.3 million people, of whom about 97 per cent are Roman Catholics, suffered decades of conflict and foreign occupation before its independence in 2002.

ASEAN’s peace plan for Myanmar, known as the Five-Point Consensus, calls for an end to violence, passage of humanitarian aid and the appointment of a special envoy of the ASEAN chair to facilitate the crisis’s mediation, among other conditions. However, there has been little progress since the country’s military coup in 2021.

Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Theresa Lazaro travelled to Naypyitaw in early January to meet the military government after taking over as the ASEAN special envoy that month. The Philippines, on May 6, called on Myanmar to allow the envoy to meet detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi, as it pressed the government for greater transparency.

Former Thai foreign minister Kasit Piromya has floated a similar idea for “soldier-to-soldier engagement”, writing in The Irrawaddy in May 2025 that ASEAN should send a military delegation led by a senior Malaysian general to “listen, assess and open the doors to dialogue”, arguing that this is one of the few languages Myanmar’s top brass understands.

On the idea of recruiting a former general to resolve the crisis, Mr Ramos-Horta harked back to his previous role of mediating for peace in Africa. In 2013, he was appointed by then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as special representative to Guinea-Bissau, a war-torn nation in West Africa.

“It was not that simple,” Mr Ramos-Horta said. “The United Nations was there, countries from the region were there – everybody was involved. From time to time, I would ask the US side: ‘Can you send me a retired US general to help me talk to the military here?’ And they would do it.

“So you have to pick the right person, at a specific moment, to influence the specific people you need to have on board.”