When landing with a UN mission in East Timor in 1999, Carolina Larriera found a scorched earth scene. Homes and plantations in an essentially rural society had been burned by militias from neighboring Indonesia, who were opposed to the restoration of independence in the small Southeast Asian nation.
Former Portuguese colony, the only Portuguese-speaking country in the region became independent in 1975, shortly after the Carnation Revolution, which ended the Salazar dictatorship. Days later, however, it was occupied by Indonesia under the dictator Suharto, who claimed the mission to repress communism in the neighborhood to start a new rule that would last 24 years and would end through a referendum in 1999.
From there until the restoration of independence, it would take more than two years of a UN mission that helped East Timor to build the foundations of a sovereign State and to understand what could be done to have a domestic economy. This Friday (20), the youngest nation of the 21st century celebrates 20 years of freedom.
“It was a situation of total lack of resources, and our challenge was to help Timor not become just another modern colony”, says Argentinian Larriera, who was part of the finance team.
Alongside the economist was Sergio Vieira de Mello, from Rio de Janeiro, who headed the UN mission in the country and for decades worked with refugee crises. Killed in a bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2003, he is still frequently honored by local leaders.
Twenty years after regaining independence, East Timor, with its 1.3 million inhabitants, is facing challenges that are not surprising — notably the urgency of diversifying the economy, which is now based on oil and gas, and a clash of generations . But it was also able to build a praised democracy and to show leaps in indices that attest to human development.
“They built a state almost from scratch and one of the most vibrant democracies in Southeast Asia. In an era of growing authoritarianism, a model that is already part of national identity joins the beacon of democracy,” says Parker Novak, master of politics. Global by George Washington University.
East Timor ranks well on the main international indices that measure democratic quality. In the Swedish V-Dem, it is classified as an electoral democracy, which means it has competitive elections and institutional guarantees. In the American Freedom House, it is described as a free country. And in terms of freedom of the press, it is ranked 17th by the NGO Reporters Without Borders — Brazil is 110th.
Despite political rights, civil liberties are hampered. “The idea of ​​sexual freedom is new,” says Unilab professor Daniel de Lucca, who taught at the National University of Timor Lorosa’e. “LGBTQIA+ demonstrations started recently, but they are still very limited due to the strength of the Catholic Church.” In Timor, more than 90% of the population declares itself Catholic.
The celebration of two decades of restoration of independence coincides with the return of José Ramos-Horta to the Presidency. The main face of the struggle for the country’s liberation alongside Xanana Gusmão, he has held the post from 2007 to 2012 and, before that, was prime minister — the Timorese political regime is semi-presidential.
In addition to the economic challenge, the country is witnessing a generational conflict that does not provoke public statements, but permeates society. On the one hand, there is the generation of 1975, “people who were at the forefront of independence, like Xanana and Ramos-Horta, and are more connected to the Portuguese cultural heritage”, explains Marcelle Trote, a doctoral student at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, and scholar of the subject.
On the other hand, there is the “foun generation” (young, in Tetum), the population that was born during the Indonesian occupation and was raised with the values ​​of that culture. “The 75 generation was there when the UN arrived and was responsible for forming the new nation, in many parts shaped by values ​​linked to the memory of Portuguese colonialism, while the ‘foun’ generation was marginalized”, adds Trote.
De Lucca recalls that there is still the “independence generation”, which, as its name says, was born after the beginning of the 21st century. With less space in public debate, younger people know the national memory through the reports of their parents and grandparents. “These young people are deprived of that political and social capital.”
Language helps explain the dilemma. Prohibited during the occupation of neighboring Indonesia, Portuguese became the official language of the state, alongside Tetum, when independence was restored. The truth, however, is that very few were fluent in the language. Cooperation programs with countries such as Portugal and Brazil have brought hundreds of educators to help teach the language to the locals.
Data from 2010 show that only 23.6% of the Timorese population was fluent in Portuguese, while 53.4% ​​spoke Tetum, and 36%, Bahasa Indonesia. Figures from 2015, the year of the last census, reveal that only 0.1% had Portuguese as their mother tongue, although many spoke it as a second or third language.
Education, by the way, has been one of the priority areas of State investment. But it is precisely from the public coffers that one of the other great challenges facing the young country arises: the collection areas. The oil and gas sector accounts for around 70% of GDP and more than 80% of the State’s annual revenue. It is necessary to diversify the economy, say the national leaders themselves.
Larriera says that in 2000, in the embryo of what would be a sovereign East Timor, it was already known that the future would be linked to the management of oil resources. “The big challenge remains that of not falling into the ‘curse of oil'”, she says, that is, in the fear that resources will run out and the country will become unstable and poorer.
With support from Norway, which has a similar project, the country created a fund that received more than US$ 23 billion and has already generated more than US$ 8.9 billion. The idea is to create savings so that future generations do not run out of oil and gas income, and the government can only use what it returns as an investment.
Local institutes, however, estimate that the fund could run out in ten years, which increases the pressure for sectors other than natural resources to enter the market economy.
The climate emergency still weighs. Especially affected by tropical cyclones, due to its geographic location, Timor has at the tip of its finances what some of the largest global economies are striving to reduce in the coming decades. “They assume demand for oil and gas will still exist, but with green energy, the demand picture could be quite different,” says Novak.
Coffee, tourism and agriculture are the main areas of investment to move away from dependence on oil. But the path has been more complicated, with climate change, the difficulty of accessing the island and barriers to entering the international market as barriers.
Still on the economic front, the country’s main objective was to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), something that, if it had been in line with the government’s strategic plans, would have been consolidated in 2015. Until today, however, the entry, seen as a chance to take a leap in economic partnerships, did not occur.
“In this sense, it is necessary to understand that the government of East Timor sees in multilateral institutions the ties and support necessary to protect them from geopolitical competition”, adds the expert from George Washington University. “After all, in a way, the State was a creation of the UN, of multilateralism.”
