Timor-Leste: The Youngest Country in Southeast Asia

• Capital: Dili [1]
• Population: about 1.4 million [2]
• Area: 14,874 square kilometers [1]
• Official languages: Tetum and Portuguese [1]
• Currency: United States dollar
• Distinguishing claim: gained full independence in 2002, making it the first new sovereign state of the 21st century [3]

Most people couldn't find Timor-Leste on a map. That's probably exactly how a lot of Timorese like it after the century they just had. The country sits at the eastern edge of the Indonesian archipelago, sharing an island with Indonesia, and it spent four hundred years as a Portuguese colony before being invaded and occupied for twenty-four years by its giant neighbor. When it finally became independent in 2002, it was the first brand new country of the twenty-first century. For a place barely bigger than Connecticut, it has packed in more history than most nations five times its size.

Timor-Leste occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor, plus the small enclave of Oecusse on the northern coast of West Timor, and the islands of Atauro and Jaco [1]. The western half of the island belongs to Indonesia. The border was drawn not by geography or culture but by which European empire got there first. The Portuguese landed in the 1500s and stuck around. The Dutch took the west. When the Dutch colonies became Indonesia in the 1940s, Portuguese Timor stayed Portuguese until 1975.

The country's two official languages, Tetum and Portuguese, reflect that split history [1]. Tetum is a local Austronesian language spoken across the country and is the everyday language of markets and homes. Portuguese is the formal language of government, courts, and many schools, kept alive through the long colonial period and consciously preserved after independence as a marker of identity distinct from Indonesia. Indonesian and English are also widely understood. It is one of the most quietly multilingual societies in Asia.

When Portugal pulled out abruptly in 1975 amid its own political upheaval, the East Timorese declared independence on November 28 of that year. Nine days later, Indonesian forces invaded [3]. What followed was a twenty-four year occupation in which an estimated 100,000 to 180,000 Timorese died from violence, displacement, hunger, and disease, out of a population that started at under 700,000 [3]. For a small society, the demographic wound was staggering.

Here is the thing nobody talks about enough. The world mostly looked the other way for two decades. The turning point came in 1991, when Indonesian soldiers opened fire on a peaceful funeral procession at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, killing more than 250 people. A British journalist's footage of the massacre reached the outside world, and international pressure began to build. After the fall of Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998, a UN-supervised referendum in 1999 saw 78.5 percent of Timorese vote for independence. Pro-Indonesian militias responded by burning roughly 70 percent of the country's infrastructure to the ground before international peacekeepers restored order. Full sovereignty came on May 20, 2002.

This one surprised me the first time I read it. The official currency of Timor-Leste is the United States dollar, the same dollar I grew up using back home in Montana. After independence, the country needed a stable currency in a hurry, did not have the institutional capacity to run its own monetary policy, and adopted the dollar as legal tender. It also mints its own small-denomination centavo coins for everyday change, since pennies and nickels were not practical to import in bulk. Walk through a market in Dili and you will see Timorese centavo coins jingling alongside the same quarters you would find in a Portland coffee shop.

For centuries, the Portuguese came to Timor for sandalwood. The fragrant wood, used for incense and carving across Asia, was so abundant on the island that it shaped the entire colonial economy. By the time independence rolled around, most of the old sandalwood was long gone. Today the main agricultural export is coffee, grown in the cool mountains around the town of Ermera [4]. Timorese coffee is mostly organic by default, since smallholder farmers cannot afford chemical inputs, and it has a small but loyal following among specialty roasters.

The bigger economic story is offshore. The Timor Sea between Timor-Leste and Australia holds significant oil and gas reserves, and revenue from the Bayu-Undan and Greater Sunrise fields funds most of the national budget through a sovereign wealth fund called the Petroleum Fund [4]. The fund is meant to outlive the oil, which is already declining, and pay for the country's transition to a more diverse economy. Whether that transition happens in time is one of the central questions of Timorese politics.

Timor is mountainous. The interior of the country climbs to Mount Ramelau at 2,963 meters, the highest point in the country, and the terrain drops sharply from the highlands to narrow coastal plains [1]. The waters around the country are part of the Coral Triangle, the global center of marine biodiversity, and Atauro Island in particular has been documented as having some of the highest reef fish diversity per site recorded anywhere on earth [5].

Crocodiles loom large here, both literally and culturally. Saltwater crocs live along the coast and in the river mouths. The traditional Timorese origin story tells of a boy who befriended a crocodile, was carried across the seas on its back, and saw the animal transform at the end of its life into the island of Timor itself. The shape of the country on a map, long and ridged like a crocodile's back, is no accident in the local imagination. You'll hear the story told in different versions in different villages, but the crocodile is always the ancestor.

Timor-Leste occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor in Southeast Asia, plus the Oecusse enclave on the northern coast of West Timor and the offshore islands of Atauro and Jaco. It lies north of Australia and shares its land border with Indonesia.

Tetum and Portuguese are the two official languages of Timor-Leste. Tetum is the everyday language spoken by most of the population, while Portuguese is used in government, courts, and parts of the education system. Indonesian and English are widely understood as working languages.

Timor-Leste restored its independence on May 20, 2002, after a UN-administered transition. The country originally declared independence from Portugal in 1975, but was invaded and occupied by Indonesia for the next twenty-four years before international intervention enabled the path to full sovereignty.

Timor-Leste uses the United States dollar as its official currency. The country also issues its own centavo coins in small denominations for everyday change, since US cents are not practical to import in volume. The dollar provides currency stability for a young economy.

Timor-Leste is known for being the youngest country in Southeast Asia, its half-island geography shared with Indonesia, Portuguese and Tetum bilingualism, its mountainous coffee-growing interior, and the exceptional reef biodiversity of the surrounding Coral Triangle waters, especially around Atauro Island.

1. Timor-Leste country profile, The World Factbook, CIA
2. Timor-Leste data, World Bank
3. Timor-Leste country profile, BBC News
4. Timor-Leste overview, World Bank
5. Atauro Island reef fish biodiversity, Conservation International