Birth of a nation: An epic effort

The emergence of Timor-Leste as an independent nation is the result of a people’s epic effort to win their sovereignty. It was only after the hardest of battles that this small South-East Asian nation won its formal independence on 20 May 2002.

Time dedicated to Timor-Leste, 19 June 2000.

Prior to this, during the 25 years of Indonesian occupation, there were an estimated 200,000 deaths in a population of just over 700,000. Moreover, it was a freedom won almost alone without the help of outside assistance and for the most part in the face of complete indifference by the international community.

The barbarity of the Indonesian occupation caused people to forget the neglect in which the earlier Portuguese colonisation had left the country. After five centuries of rule, the Portuguese left the nation in a state of abject poverty, without infrastructure and virtually without the human capital to develop a new nation.

A quick history lesson is useful. More than 3,000 years ago the island was already inhabited by the Atoli, a Melanesian population. About 2,500 years ago successive waves of new immigrants began to arrive from various tribes.
Colonial adventures began at a time when Islam was in the process of taking root in the region. But Portuguese missionaries landed on the eastern part of the island where they converted the Tetum (Bélu) to Catholicism. During the 16th century the country went to war against the Muslim kingdom of Sombay, which was established in the west of the island and protected by the Dutch.
The Dutch were victorious and established rule over the greater part of the region. They held Indonesia and western Timor, while the Portuguese had to settle for eastern Timor and the enclave of Oecussi in the north of western Timor – borders that were not legally recognised by the International Court of Justice in The Hague until 1914.

By this time, the beginning of the 20th century, Portugal had virtually abandoned Timor. Its interest in the island was only reawakened with the start of World War II in the heated context of ideology clashes. However, while the Portuguese government opted to support the Allies, eastern Timor soon found itself at the mercy of Japanese invasion forces. The small South-East Asian nation put up a heroic resistance to defend the Allied cause, losing 50,000 lives and suffering total devastation in the process.

When the war was over there was little recognition of Timor’s heroism and life simply returned to ‘business as usual’. The Salazarist military dictatorship was reinstalled in the east.

Eastern Timor’s population rose up in revolt against the fascist regime in 1961, but the dictatorship was not about to loosen its grip on the country.
Portugal’s Carnation Revolution overthrew the extremist Lisbon regime on 25 April 1974, and the new Portugal quickly recognised the rights of its colonies to independence.

Political parties began to form in Timor and three political groups took shape:

  • A rightist party, advocating joining with Indonesia (the Timorese Popular Democratic Association, Apodeti);
  • A conservative group, seeking autonomy within the framework of a Portuguese Republic (the Timor Democratic Union, UDT);
  • A revolutionary and separatist left-wing organisation (the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor, Fretilin), which is still a part of the political scene today.

Back in Lisbon, the Portuguese Parliament organised the election of a popular assembly on Timor as a prelude to granting the country its independence in October 1978.

But in November 1975, in reaction to Lisbon’s decision, the UDT and Apodeti launched hostilities against Fretilin. The country was plunged into civil war, finally won by Fretilin which proclaimed the country’s independence on 28 November. But the victory was to be short-lived and just 10 days later, on 7 December 1975 Indonesian forces invaded the country, plunging it into a quarter century of unprecedented suffering.

The first five days of the invasion brought the deaths of 5,000 Timorese. But the resistance proved to be more resilient than the invaders had expected and in retaliation the Indonesians resorted to the full range of barbaric practices, including concentration camps, the use of civilians as human shields, torture, deportations, summary executions and the burning of vegetation. In all, there were 200,000 deaths linked directly to the Indonesian occupation out of a population of 700,000. Indeed, Timor was officially annexed as one of its provinces.

The guerrilla war that ensued lasted for almost a quarter of a century and was very effectively organised. This despite the almost total lack of international support, mainly due to Fretelin’s Marxist tendencies.

The world left Indonesia to do as it pleased with Timor. Despite Fretelin’s extreme resistance they gradually lost their control. This was a period that saw a strategy described by the occupiers as ‘surround and annihilate’ that was assisted from 1978 by the use of ground-attack aircraft supplied by the United States. As part of their efforts to annihilate Fretelin, the Indonesians put into place in 1981 a human barrier that forced 80,000 Timorese men (including boys) to form a human chain to trap the Fretelin guerrillas in the centre of the country. The operation failed.

As the 1980s drew to a close, Frelitin still didn’t give up the struggle. Then on 12 November 1991 came the Santa Cruz massacre, which proved to be one act of barbarity too far. The Indonesians confessed to 19 dead, but the actual figure was more than 250 and Santa Cruz became a visible symbol of the real horror of Timor. But with the guerrilla war virtually at a standstill, it was the people themselves who finally took to the streets for sustained action. Rebel leader and poet, Xanana Gusmão (currently Prime Minister of Timor), was arrested, but he was far too famous to be quietly eliminated. As a prisoner he acquired iconic status at home and abroad and the international community could no longer turn a blind eye to the situation. He and two other symbolic figures of the struggle for independence, Carlos Belo, Archbishop of Dili and José Ramos-Horta, the Fretilin representative to the UN, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.

The situation remained a stalemate until president Suharto was overthrown in 1998. His successor [Rudy] Habibie – despite a display of strength when he first came to power – decided a few months later to organise, under UN supervision, a referendum aimed at granting autonomy and eventual independence to what would be Timor-Leste. Pro-integration militias, whose existence was tolerated by the army, responded with a wave of violence. Yet despite all the intimidation, the referendum of 30 August 1999 brought an overwhelming victory: 78.5% voted ‘yes’.

Once again the pro-Indonesian militias, aided by the army, brought violence and destruction to the country. Some 200,000 citizens of Dili and other towns were forced to seek refuge in the mountains. Among the towns attacked, one in particular acquired a symbolic value – Suai, in the south-west of Timor-Leste. Here the army, surrounding a group who had sought refuge in a church, murdered three priests who had come out to negotiate and carried out a massacre that, according to some estimates, left 200 dead. This atrocity was witnessed by the international press and consequently Indonesia was forced to accept the deployment of UN forces.

A few weeks later, the final 15,000 men of the Indonesian army left the country they had devastated. A country that was without water, electricity supplies, telephones and much of the infrastructure, including schools, burned to the ground.

For the next three years, UN troops supported by the UN Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET), headed by the Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello*, worked to ready the country for independence. Voter turnout in the free and democratic elections of 30 August, 2001 was 93%, and brought power to Fretilin, the party that had maintained the resistance for a quarter of a century. Formal independence was proclaimed on 20 May 2002 with the freedom fighter and poet Xanana Gusmão as President. Prime Minister was the legendary Fretilin leader, Mari Alkatiri, who had returned from exile in Mozambique. For once, David had defeated Goliath.

* Sérgio Vieira de Mello was an experienced Brazilian United Nations diplomat who was killed along with 21 other UN staff members in the Canal Hotel bombing in Iraq whilst serving as the UN’s Secretary General Special Representative to the country. He was the UN Transitional Administrator in Timor-Leste, December 1999–May 2002.

Hegel Goutier

Back to the Table of Contents.

write a comment





If you can't read the word, click here.
CAPTCHA image for SPAM prevention