From the Place of the Dead: The Epic Struggles of Bishop Belo of East Timor.

From the Place of the Dead: The Epic Struggles of Bishop Bolo of East Timor Arnold S. Kohen St. Martin's Press. 332 pages. $27.95.

Independence supporters were not optimistic when the Vatican named Carlos Ximenes Belo as East Timor's Apostolic Administrator in 1983. His predecessor had been forced out due to his outspokenness about atrocities since the Indonesian invasion eight years earlier. Vatican politics apparently required a quieter representative. Belo was presumed to be it. But Belo grew along with his church.

In reporter Arnold Kohen's work, the story of the bishop and the nation are in many ways one. In 1989, Belo called for the plebiscite that finally came ten years later. In 1991, he sheltered hundreds of fugitives from the Indonesian military, following the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre that killed at least 271 Timorese.

Not every Nobel Peace Prize winner has advanced the cause of world peace, but Belo did. After he and Jose Ramos-Horta, the chief spokesman for the Timorese resistance, won the prize in 1996, a world that had tried its best to ignore the tiny former Portuguese colony simply could not do so any longer.

This biography is as good a history of East Timor's tortuous last twenty-five years as you will find.