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The East Timorese government does not believe that we should consider compensation for the victims because there are tens of thousands of people who were, in one way or another, affected by the violence either directly or indirectly.

Such a structure would also raise a number of problems: first of all, which Timorese to pay compensation to? It would open a can of worms in terms of who was really a victim and who was not.

Indonesia was colonized for 350 years. We lost our mind-set for entrepreneurship. We only become workers.

The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom and peace. But in the face of United States aggression they have risen up, united as one man.

In the 1990s, I was among those Indonesians who demanded and celebrated the departure of our own autocrat, Suharto, and I joined the new government when he left.

Everyone with all those good intentions came to help Indonesia rebuild from the tsunami; but the co-ordination problem was very big, because they came with their own way of doing business; they came with the inflexibility of their own governance.

India helped Bangladesh to achieve independence. The Bangladeshis should remain happy inside the territory of their own country.

We all have that capacity to lose our humanity when circumstances force us to do so. It's not specific to people who live in Africa or Latin America or Asia. And equally, we are capable of regaining ourselves.