The history of Timor-Leste

Timor-Leste, or East Timor, occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor, together with the enclave of Oecusse on the north-west coast and the islands of Atauro and Jaco. For thousands of years it was home to many small kingdoms speaking Austronesian and Papuan languages, which traded sandalwood with Asian merchants. Portugal ruled the territory, loosely at first, for more than four centuries, sharing the island with the Dutch. When Portugal withdrew in 1975, Indonesia invaded, and its occupation until 1999 cost at least 102,800 Timorese lives according to the country's truth commission. After a United Nations ballot and a period of UN administration, Timor-Leste became independent in 2002, the first new sovereign state of the twenty-first century.

Timor was settled by some of the first modern humans to cross the seas of South-east Asia, the same wave of migration that carried the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians to Australia. Remains in the Laili cave in Manatuto date back some 43,000 to 44,000 years. At Jerimalai cave, at the eastern tip, early islanders caught tuna and other deep-sea fish, and one of the oldest fish hooks in the world, between 16,000 and 23,000 years old, was found there.

Later waves of people brought new languages and ways of life. Speakers of Papuan languages, related to those of New Guinea, still live mostly in the east, while Austronesian-speaking farmers, whose ancestors came ultimately from Taiwan through the islands, arrived from around 3000 BCE, bringing pottery, pigs and new crops. Over time the island's rugged mountains sheltered a great diversity of peoples, and around 30 languages and dialects are spoken today, including Tetum, Mambai, Makasae and Fataluku. Origin stories tell of ancestors who arrived by sea, and many communities trace their identity through sacred houses, the uma lulik, that keep the heirlooms and memory of a lineage.

By around 1000 CE fortified hilltop settlements were being built across Timor, perhaps because of growing competition for land and for the island's most valuable product, white sandalwood. A thirteenth-century Chinese text, the Zhu Fan Zhi, describes Timor as a source of sandalwood, and by the fourteenth century Chinese, Javanese, Malay and Indian traders came for it, along with beeswax, honey and slaves, offering cloth, metal goods and porcelain in return. The Javanese poem Nagarakretagama of 1365 lists Timor among the lands owing tribute to Majapahit, though Javanese influence on the island seems to have been slight, and Islam did not take root there.

The island was divided among dozens of small kingdoms ruled by liurai, chiefs whose power rested on ritual authority, kinship and alliances sealed by marriage and the exchange of goods. Early European accounts describe two great groupings: Servião in the west, and Belos, of some fifty kingdoms, in the east. The kingdom of Wehali in central Timor held a special ritual seniority over many others.

Survivors of the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan stopped at Timor in 1522 and noted traders from Luzon buying sandalwood. Portuguese merchants had already begun visiting between 1512 and 1515, after the Portuguese Empire took Malacca. In 1556 Dominican friars founded a mission on the nearby island of Solor, which became the centre of Portuguese activity. A mixed community of Portuguese, Timorese and other islanders, known as the Topasses or "Black Portuguese", grew up around the missions and the trade and became a power in its own right, often defying officials sent from Goa or Macau.

Rivalry with the Dutch shaped the island's future. The Dutch East India Company seized Solor in 1613 and the port of Kupang in western Timor in the 1650s, and the Portuguese moved their base to Lifau, in today's Oecusse. Portugal appointed its first governor of Timor in 1702, but its authority was weak, challenged by the Topasses, Dominican friars and rebellious kingdoms, and in 1769 the governor abandoned Lifau and moved the capital east to Dili. For long periods Portuguese Timor was administered from Goa or Macau and was among the empire's most neglected possessions. Repeated negotiations over enclaves and borders ended in the Treaty of Lisbon of 1859, which left the west to the Dutch East Indies and the east, with Oecusse, to Portugal. The final border was set by arbitration at The Hague in 1914.

Only in the late nineteenth century did Portugal try to control the interior directly. Governor José Celestino da Silva, who took office in the 1890s, waged repeated military campaigns against the kingdoms, forced the planting of coffee, which became the main export, and prepared a head tax that required a census of every household. The liurai lost much of their power, and Portuguese officials reorganised villages into administrative units called sucos. Resentment at the new tax and at forced labour fuelled a rebellion in 1911 and 1912 led by Dom Boaventura, the liurai of Manufahi, which was crushed with troops brought from Mozambique and with naval gunfire, at the cost of thousands of Timorese lives. Portugal also used the colony as a place of exile for political prisoners, including many anarchists and opponents of the Salazar dictatorship.

In December 1941 Australian and Dutch troops landed in neutral Portuguese Timor, expecting a Japanese attack, and in February 1942 the Empire of Japan invaded. During the Second World War a small Allied force, supported by many Timorese helpers, fought a guerrilla campaign in the mountains for a year before being withdrawn. The Japanese burned villages and seized food in reprisal, and between 40,000 and 70,000 Timorese died during the occupation. Portugal resumed control in 1945 but invested little. In 1959 a small revolt at Viqueque was suppressed. By the early 1970s most Timorese were still farmers, and only a small educated elite, many trained in Catholic schools, had emerged.

The Carnation Revolution of April 1974 in Portugal brought a government committed to ending its empire. Political parties formed in Dili: the UDT, which at first wanted continued ties with Portugal; Fretilin, which called for rapid independence and had a left-wing programme; and the small Apodeti, which wanted integration with Indonesia. Indonesia's military government under Suharto, fiercely anti-communist and wary of an independent state inside its archipelago, worked through its intelligence services to divide the parties and promote integration. On 11 August 1975 the UDT attempted a coup, and a brief civil war followed in which Fretilin gained control of most of the territory. The Portuguese governor withdrew to Atauro island.

Indonesian forces began raids across the border, and in October 1975 they killed five foreign journalists working for Australian television at Balibo. With Portugal absent, Fretilin declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of East Timor on 28 November 1975. Nine days later, on 7 December, Indonesia launched a full-scale air and sea invasion of Dili. United States President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had met Suharto in Jakarta the day before, and declassified documents show they raised no objection, while most of the weapons used were American. In July 1976 Indonesia declared East Timor its 27th province. The UN General Assembly and Security Council called for Indonesia to withdraw, and the UN continued to regard Portugal as the administering power, but during the Cold War Western governments largely accepted Indonesian rule, and Australia formally recognised the annexation.

Fretilin's armed wing, Falintil, held much of the interior until 1978. The Indonesian army's campaigns of encirclement and bombing in 1977 and 1978 drove hundreds of thousands of people from the mountains into resettlement camps, where food was short and aid was blocked, and famine killed vast numbers. Massacres, torture, rape and disappearances were widespread throughout the occupation. In its final report, Chega!, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) estimated that at least 102,800 Timorese died as a result of the conflict between 1974 and 1999: about 18,600 were killed or disappeared, and about 84,200 died from hunger and illness above the normal death rate. The commission stated that this was a minimum and that the total could have been as high as 183,000. It found that the great majority of the deaths were the responsibility of the Indonesian security forces. Many scholars describe these events as a genocide.

Indonesia built roads, schools and clinics and invested heavily in the province, but it also settled migrants from elsewhere in the archipelago and banned the use of Portuguese. Under the leadership of Xanana Gusmão the resistance reorganised in the 1980s into a broad national front, with a guerrilla army in the hills, an underground in the towns and a diplomatic front abroad, led by José Ramos-Horta. The Catholic Church, which grew from a minority to the faith of almost the entire population, became a refuge and a voice for the Timorese, and Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo spoke out against abuses.

On 12 November 1991 Indonesian troops opened fire on a funeral procession at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, killing more than 200 people by most estimates. The massacre was filmed by a foreign journalist, and the footage drew world attention to East Timor. Gusmão was captured in 1992 and sentenced to twenty years in prison, and in 1996 Belo and Ramos-Horta shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Asian financial crisis brought down Suharto in May 1998. His successor, B. J. Habibie, offered East Timor special autonomy and then, in January 1999, agreed to let its people choose. Under an agreement between Indonesia, Portugal and the United Nations, a UN mission organised a ballot, while army-backed militias terrorised the population. On 30 August 1999, 78.5 percent of voters rejected autonomy and chose independence. The militias and Indonesian forces then launched a campaign of killing and destruction. More than a thousand people were killed, about 300,000 were forced across the border into West Timor, and most of the territory's buildings and infrastructure were burned. Under international pressure Indonesia accepted a peacekeeping force, and the Australian-led INTERFET arrived on 20 September.

The United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor governed the territory from October 1999 while new institutions were built. A constituent assembly was elected in 2001, and on 20 May 2002 the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste became independent, with Xanana Gusmão as president. It joined the United Nations that September, with Portuguese and Tetum as official languages.

The new state started almost from nothing, and its early years were troubled. In 2006 the dismissal of hundreds of soldiers who had protested against discrimination led to fighting between the army and police factions and gang violence in Dili, in which dozens were killed and some 150,000 people fled their homes. Foreign troops returned, and Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri resigned. Ramos-Horta became president in 2007 and Gusmão prime minister. In February 2008 Ramos-Horta was gravely wounded when rebel soldiers attacked his home. UN peacekeepers left at the end of 2012.

Oil and gas revenues from the Timor Sea paid for most government spending, through a petroleum fund set up in 2005. A long dispute with Australia over the sea boundary and its resources, made worse by revelations that Australia had spied on Timorese negotiators, ended with a maritime boundary treaty in 2018. The CAVR's report, delivered in 2005, was largely confirmed by a joint Indonesian–Timorese Commission of Truth and Friendship in 2008, and the two countries have built cordial relations, though almost no one has been punished for the crimes of the occupation.

Ramos-Horta was elected president again in 2022, and after the CNRT party won the most seats in the parliamentary election of May 2023, Gusmão returned as prime minister in July of that year. The country remains one of the poorest in Asia and faces the decline of its oil and gas fields. On 26 October 2025, at a summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Timor-Leste was admitted as the eleventh member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which it had sought to join since 2011.