How UN chief Antonio Guterres tests the limits of quiet diplomacy

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. 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. 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.

The crisis resonated in Portugal, where linguistic, Catholic, and historical ties to its former colony helped fuel a solidarity movement. An estimated 10,000 demonstrators, dressed in white, formed human chains through Lisbon’s city streets.

Guterres had raised the issue before. 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. The proposal was met with an awkward silence.

This time, Guterres was asking the United States to support a UN mission in East Timor, but Washington was reluctant to confront 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. 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.

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. The next day, amid growing international pressure, the White House stated that Indonesia “must” allow international 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. East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, finally won its freedom in 2002. For spearheading diplomatic efforts during the 1999 crisis, Guterres was awarded Timorese citizenship in 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.

“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.

“There is also a kind of love story with the UN, I mean, that strong link between Timor-Leste and the UN… Multilateralism, which is still really the purpose of the UN, has been critical in the independence of Timor-Leste. And Guterres [himself] became very important in the UN starting from 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. He carried those experiences into a career built on finding common ground and helping people caught in 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.