Many countries have been founded and fallen throughout history – but this is usually a process of decades to centuries, and it seems difficult to find a case of a country that managed to go through such a cycle in a week and a half. This is where East Timor comes in, a republic on the eastern half of an island above northwestern Australia. We used Forefront and Perplexity to encapsulate the brief and dramatic history of the first independent East Timor.
On November 28, 1975 – exactly 38 years ago – East Timor unilaterally declared independence from Portugal, which had ruled it as a colony for over 400 years, after a brief civil war. She never imagined that she would be freed from one occupier only to fall into the hands of another.
Portugal, for its part, accepted the separation, as it was in the process of withdrawing from its former colonies due to its transition to modern democratic rule – but neighboring Indonesia took advantage of the situation and its forces crossed the border into the new country on December 7, 1975. Indonesia annexed East Timor, returned the entire island to Timor (without East and West), and ruled it brutally for 24 years. Up to 183,000 East Timor, or about 25% of the country's population as of 75, are estimated to have died during the Indonesian occupation, either from fighting or from starvation and disease.
After two and a half decades of guerrilla warfare, a UN-sponsored referendum was held in East Timor, in which the local population voted an absolute majority of 28.5% in favour of independence. The United Nations established a temporary control mechanism in the country, and in 2002 handed control over to the independent East Timor government, the first independent state declared in the 21st century.
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