Ramos-Horta concedes East Timor poll loss

East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta, who won the 1996 Nobel peace prize after years of campaigning against Indonesian rule, conceded defeat Monday in his bid to win a second term and congratulated rivals set to face off in a second vote in April. Francisco Guterres, from the main opposition Fretilin party, and Jose Maria de Vasconcelos, the former army chief and guerrilla leader, were the two leading candidates in the first-round vote, according to electoral commission data. The president of Asia’s newest and poorest stte plays little role in policy but is vital in projecting stability after a bloody struggle that led to independence in 2002 and scattered violence around parliamentary polls in 2007. After 84 percent of the vote had been counted, Guterres led with 128,266 votes or 28.45 percent, while de Vasconcelos had 113,553 votes or 25.16 percent. Ramos-Horta was in third with 80,291 votes or 17.81 percent. “I congratulate the two candidates who continue into the second round,” Ramos-Horta told a news conference. Economics has been the dominant issue with voters in the former Portuguese colony, occupied by neighboring Indonesia in 1975. Around 41 percent of East Timor’s 1.2 million people live below $0.88 a day, according to the World Bank, and malnutrition is a significant problem. Ramos-Horta, who survived an assassination attempt in 2008, had said he wanted to retire from politics and only agreed to run in late January after a petition from supporters. East Timor, the eastern half of an island at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, became independent in 2002 after nearly two decades under unpopular Indonesian control. Ramos-Horta shared the Nobel Prize in 1996 for working for a peaceful solution to the East Timor conflict. He spent years working to end Indonesian rule and speaking out abroad for the opposition.