Asia’s young republic keeps a Portuguese half of Timor
Timor-Leste, or East Timor, covers the eastern half of Timor plus Oecusse exclave and Atauro and Jaco islands—about 15,000 square kilometres of Southeast Asian shore. Papuan and Austronesian settlement mixed Melanesian and Asian cultures before Portuguese rule from the sixteenth century until 1975.
Timor comes from the Malay word for east, so the country's name effectively says east twice; in Tetun it is Timór Lorosa'e, where the sun rises. Remains at Jerimalai on the eastern tip date to 42,000 years ago. Before Europeans arrived, villages grouped around sacred houses formed principalities called sucos, which in turn belonged to kingdoms where a liurai's worldly power was balanced by the spiritual authority of a rai nain.
Sandalwood, prized for carving and perfume, drew traders from perhaps the thirteenth century and later brought the Portuguese. Pushed around by the Dutch, they moved from Solor to Flores, then to Kupang in 1646, lost it in 1652 and settled at Lifau in today's Oecusse. Dili was founded only in 1769, and an arbitration court fixed the island's Dutch-Portuguese border in 1914. During the Second World War a guerrilla campaign against Japanese occupation killed between 40,000 and 70,000 Timorese civilians.
After Portugal's 1974 revolution the colony slid into civil war. Fretilin declared independence on 28 November 1975, and Indonesia invaded nine days later, annexing the territory as its 27th province in 1976. A truth commission counted at least 102,800 conflict deaths between 1974 and 1999, most from hunger and illness, and other estimates run as high as 200,000. The 1991 massacre of more than 200 protesters turned world opinion.
In August 1999 a UN-supervised vote chose independence despite militia violence, and INTERFET peacekeepers restored order. Independence arrived on 20 May 2002, the first new state of the century, with Xanana Gusmão as president. The 2022 census counted over 1.34 million people, speaking some 30 indigenous languages alongside official Portuguese and Tetun.
Source: Timor-Leste
