A Very Young Country: Timor Leste

Timor smells different from Flores. It has that red dust scent with hints of gum, a dryness in the air, a scent more Australian than Asian.

It looks different, too. Low huts, vast rivers reduced to swathes of pebbles, hills warped by geology into ludicrous curves, bent like the landscapes we saw in Arkaroola, South Australia.

There are gnarled trees with leaves like toughened mimosas, droopy-leaved columns of shade trees, the Caribbean touch of bougainvillea.

We’re close to Australia, in Timor. Far closer than we are to Bali. 24 hours by boat from luxuriant Flores. 36 from dusty Darwin, plus or minus.

And it feels, the closer we get to Papua, the further we are moving from Asia.


The shifting rivalries of tribal kings and the interests of the colonial powers split the island of Timor into three. (It’s still home to a myriad kings, plus tens of tribal languages.)

West Timor is part of Indonesia. When the country carved itself into existence out of the Dutch possessions in the wake of World War II, West Timor was part of it.

East Timor? Well, that’s Timor Leste now, an independent nation, one of the world’s newest and one of its smallest: it’s only nine years old. It occupies the Eastern half of the island and a dot in the Indonesian west called Oecussi.

How so? Well, the Portuguese, the first colonists into the region, somehow clung on to their half of the island, and Oecussi, until the 1970s. Then from Angola downwards, their empire fell to pieces, and Timor Leste was free.

For, erm, nine days.

Then the Indonesian army moved in and occupied it. Its brutal occupation would last two and a half decades and lead, according to some Timorese estimates, to the deaths of one-third of the population.

There’s a museum in Dili. But, like a lot of stuff here, it’s currently being rebuilt.


On the drive from the Indonesian border we while away the time by playing “spot the UN vehicle”.

The UN’s been in here for well over a decade now, first supporting the removal of the Indonesians, then helping with reconstruction, then reconstructing again after they pulled out a little too soon and the new nation collapsed into internecine strife…

We pass villages of simple bamboo huts, thatch roofs, scrawny livestock. Hills, which in their curving redness resonate Australia, frame coastal villages where folk eke a brutal living salt farming. The first town we get to that’s big enough to have masonry has bullet-holes in some of it.

And there’s the big UN landcruisers rolling by, with A/C and tinted glass.

A contrast, to put it mildly.


We’re not sure we’re into Dili at first. The Timor Leste capital is the lowest rise city I’ve seen, lower rise even, I think, than Nouakchott, Mauritania.

It sprawls for miles along the bay, yet standing below the vast statue of Jesus which Suharto pointed at Jakarta like some sick joke on the cape outside town, it’s barely visible against the hills behind.

Except for the churches. Of which, as in Indonesian Flores, there are many. And the pristine white lines of the Palacio Goberno.


Dili is not a large place – far smaller and with a much poorer population than its Indonesian opposite number, Kupang, a buzzing city of 400,000.

But it’s a melting pot. And – this takes me by surprise – it’s culturally utterly distinct from Indonesian West Timor.

There’s Tetun spoken, Portuguese, Indonesian, English, a kind of weird Tetun-Portuguese creole, a whirlpool of Chinese scripts… (Chinese traders were here before the Portuguese and it takes more than a pogrom or two to shift them out.)

We meet Timorese with African features, Papuan features, Oceanian features, a sprinkling with Malaysian features…

The bright waterfront, the big ships mouldering in the waters, men up to their knees fishing, vendors touting green coconuts for sale with spoons ready cut from their shells feels – well, it feels Caribbean, in a way.


On the whitish beach round the cape from the Jesus Statue, Areia Branca, we eat baby veal carpaccio at white-clad tables with billowing draperies at a Portuguese-African-Timorese-European restaurant named Knua Morabeza, where a guy draws on a fat cigar as he works at his laptop.

Timorese women scrape seaweed from the shore with their bare hands, itinerant traders walk past dangling bunches of oranges from shoulder yokes, and optimistic touts push mobile phone top-ups, cigarettes and weaving, as guys play ping pong on the beach…

“You can get anything in Dili, if you pay,” someone told us before we came.

He was, up to a point, right. You can’t find English language books – though there is a library, or “reading room”. But there are sushi restaurants, Australian bars, Turkish breads, Australian wines, imported spirits, fine dining restaurants, pizzerias…

Just after the World Bank, we walk down an alley past a stinking “stream” in which two guys wade barefoot – fishing?!


And you sort of wonder where it’s going to end. I’m told the channel between Dili and Atauro island, 30km or so off shore, descends 3.5km below the surface of the sea, into the Timor Trench.

Nice for tourists, as whales often pass through.

Even nicer for the world’s great powers, since it’s one of the few places deep enough for nuclear subs of all persuasions to cross between oceans unchecked. There’s talk of Americans building a submarine base into the island; the Australians tried to build a dumping ground for boat people here.

So I guess some of the big swish embassies which line Dili’s main drag will stay and prosper…

Z’s gobsmacked by them. “China, I can understand,” he says. “Malaysia too, I guess. But Poland?! Cuba?!”


It’s a dry land, Timor, and mountainous. Not made for farming. There are oil and gas reserves, and a little gold, too.

But it’s hard to see how they can possibly build an economy here, how they can manufacture anything, grow anything, even craft anything.

There’s an economy running now, turbocharged by NGOs, peacekeepers, trainers, UN workers. But what happens when they leave?

Tourism, I’d hope.

Because it’s a beautiful place, Timor Leste.

But at the same time, you wonder how a country this poor, this small and this young can honestly ever exist. It’s a question, I think, folk are puzzling over themselves.

19 Responses

  1. nikki says:

    So interesting! pics please I need to see it:)
    http://www.eastsidecurry.com

  2. Edward Rees says:

    The economy is turbo charged by oil money, not NGOs and UN’ers.

    • Theodora says:

      OK, thanks for that corrective. Just seem to be relatively few Timorese in the restaurants, bars, supermarkets &c. I thought the oil money was being put into a fund and released slowly. Is that not the case?

  3. Kristy says:

    Sounds like an awesome place to visit. I have been facinated with Timor Leste since its independence and it seems like this is a good time to visit a new country as she grows into her own. Can’t wait to read more about your trip.

    • Theodora says:

      We’re getting out of Dili today! Finally. So expect more of Timor Leste. It is a fascinating place, and i’m hoping to get some decent photos too.

  4. Scott says:

    I have a few old Army buddies that served there in peacekeeping activities some time ago; it is interesting to read how it has come around…

    • Theodora says:

      It’s a funny old place, I can tell you that. Must have been a dump when they were first peace-keeping. Apparently, the UN and peace-keepers move out next year if they can keep it together at the election without everything kicking off again…

  5. Snap says:

    So…you made it! No roads and all, lol. Just kidding. Sorry I haven’t been commenting…’things’ are going on. I just read Z’s take on Timor Leste and all joking aside, it will be wonderful to see more photos of the place and hear about what’s happening there.

    Cheers!

  6. Ken Westmoreland says:

    As Ed mentioned, the economy is turbo charged by oil money, so Timor Leste isn’t that poor when it comes to resources – however, it is far less oil-rich than the likes of Brunei, although that could be a reason to diverisfy into ecotourism, like Mauritius, the Seychelles or the Maldives. The oil money is being held in a fund, but the current AMP government wants to spend more of it. Fretilin doesn’t, pointing to the example of countries like Nauru which suffered from a ‘resource curse’, spent like there was no tomorrow, and then went bankrupt. That said, not spending money at all would just mean stagnation and poverty.

    I can’t see why the country couldn’t be self-sufficient in food – it’s exported it to the Indonesian half of the island. It’s got far more in the way of farmland than Singapore, which has to import everything, even most of its water.

    What you call a ‘weird Tetun-Portuguese creole’ is Tetun-Dili or Tetun-Prasa the form of the language that most people in the country speak as a lingua franca, and the one used as an official language. The pure form, Tetun-Terik, is used by no more than a quarter of the population as a first language.

    The reason why there is a Cuban Embassy in Dili is because Cuba is activiely involved in healthcare and literacy in Timor Leste. There isn’t a Polish Embassy, that would be the Indonesian one. I think Z got the two countries’ flags mised up – Poland’s is white over red, Indnesian’s is red over white.

    • Theodora says:

      Hi Ken,

      Thanks for your detailed response, in particular as regards the oil. I’d had the impression that the oil reserves were a) pretty small and b) being released very slowly — not least, I guess, cos Dili doesn’t yet have the oil-rich look of places like Sarawak, let alone the mid-East –and it’s good to have a proper perspective with the internal politics of that explained as well.

      “Creole” is the wrong term for Tetun-Dili, I’d agree, though it does have a hell of a lot of Portuguese in it, especially when you get your first blast or two of it. A hybrid?

      Poland has, according to the Dili fold-out street map with the ads, a Consulate-General, not an Embassy, though I have to say it was one of the few national representatives we haven’t passed in town. (Unlike the Indonesian Embassy, which we’ve visited four times in quest of a visa…) Thanks for your insights into Cuba. Z was wondering whether there were old Communist bloc allegiances being played out. Anyway, I’ve passed that along to him.

      I’m amazed Timor Leste was a net exporter during the Indonesian occupation, but, again, my impression’s probably slanted by coming from the more moist tropical parts of Indonesia into the middle of the dry season — in fact, even Indonesian Timor seems less arid, less mountainous, more fertile than Timor Leste. But that’s good to know.

  7. Ken Westmoreland says:

    Thanks for the info about Poland, Theodora, although it’s an honorary consulate-general, so may be more prominent on the street map than on the actual street. Poland closed a lot of embassies and consulates three years ago, so it’d be surprising if it opened an embassy in Dili!

    You could say that Tetun-Dili is creolised by Portuguese, but not is a creole of Portuguese. The best analogy would be the influence of Norman French on modern English, which is a Germanic language, but one that has been creolised by a Latin one. However, the phonetic spelling of Portuguese words in Tetun-Dili is similar to that used in Cape Verde’s Creole (Krioulu Kabuverdianu) – bondia, benvindu etc.

    Ironically, unlike other places in Asia where the Portuguese had a presence, there was never a Portuguese creole in Timor Leste. Even in parts of Indonesia, there were creoles spoken in places like Tugu in Java, Ternate in Sulawesi, and Larantuka in Flores. There was a Portuguese creole spoken in Bidau in Dili, but that originally came from Larantuka and died out in the 1950s. That said, the link with Portuguese was always there as a result of loanwords flooding into Tetum and other local languages, and a Portuguese-medium school, the Externato de São José, survived in Dili until 1992, when it was shut down by the Indonesian military following the Santa Cruz massacre.

    When I mentioned exports to Indonesia, I was taking about post-independence. Under the Indonesian occupation, the export of coffee was a monopoly of the military-backed PT Denok.

  8. Ken Westmoreland says:

    As regards Cuba, it also offers medical assistance to other small states in the region, in the Pacific. I don’t much care for the regime in Havana, and some of the people in Australia who defend it, but it has often done a better job in training Timorese doctors than other donor countries, or in providing doctors who are prepared to rough it out in rural areas. By the way, I recently saw a transcript of an email from a Timorese medical student in Cuba, which added Spanish to Tetum as well as Portuguese, Indonesian and English. Now that really was weird!

    • Theodora says:

      I’ve heard the Cuban healthcare system is pretty much a standout in the region… I find the sheer number of languages people will use simultaneously here spectacular. It’s not like Malaysia, where people tend to speak one language at a time. Here they seem to mix them up quite happily. Which is probably because, as you explain so wonderfully below, the lingua franca is such a hybrid.

  9. Ken Westmoreland says:

    Same here – I have many Timorese friends here in the UK, and when they have parties, they will switch between four languages effortlessly, in addition to mixing languages when they speak to each other in Tetum. In Malaysia there is a lingua franca, Manglish, just as in Singapore there’s Singlish, but that’s as far as the language mixing goes. Although the national anthem of Singapore Majulah Singapura is in Malay, most people, being Chinese, can’t understand the words. People in Timor Leste can at least pick out a lot of the Portuguese words in their national anthem, Pátria through Tetum.
    However, one thing that Timor Leste can learn from Singapore is having multilingual public signs – English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil, sometimes Japanese as well, not to mention subtitling on TV and at the cinema. This is some subtitling I did when I was visiting the Ministry of Education – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4LVFSADKs

  10. Andy Welch says:

    Interesting, punchy and descriptive- a good read and relevant to my course at the moment as I’m reading Design as Politics by Tony fry who did some work in Timor to construct a craft economy.
    http://www.slowquest.co.uk/

    • Theodora says:

      Thanks, Andy. Check the comments, if you didn’t already, for a couple of good correctives from people who know Timor Leste better than me.

  11. antonio says:

    First at all, I must say this is a very interesting and complete entry and comments on Timor-Leste.

    Concerning the presence of Cuba in Timor-Leste, as Ken pointed out, it’s basically related to the aid policy Cuba follows since the revolution. They keep providing professional training and technical experts (mainly medicine and agricultural engineering) to many developing countries and also hosting students in Cuba for training and education, specially with African countries, where they were also deeply involved in the independency processes of countries such as Angola and Namibia (at some point they even sent thousands of troops there to help in the fight against the South African apartheid army).

    Many timorese medical students have been trained in Cuba, some of them during 5 years until completing their degrees in Medicine there. Also there is a heavy presence of cuban medical teachers and staff both in the hospitals and the medical school. The funny thing is that because all the cuban medical literature and technical books are in Spanish, these students have to learn it as well. A timorese medical student will speak you in Spanish, Tetun, Bahasa, some Portuguese and some English…crazy!

    As a personal point of view, maybe the Cuban way of providing aid is not as ‘flashy’ or widely known as the aid provided by international agencies or other western aid agencies, they are quite discrete in fact. But I find it effective, right to the bone (it’s based in capaciting the local population in high technical skills) and very cost-effective.

    The national health system in Timor, so far it’s free of charge for any timorese (and also to foreigners who for whatever the reason had to be treated at the hospitals). The main hospitals are in good condition and more or less well run if you compare with similar underdeveloped countries, though there is obviously a lack of supplies, and many remote villages have severe difficulties in accessing the basic facilities (mostly due to the precarious road infrastructure all across Timor-Leste).

    Hope this tiny and beautiful country does well in the years to come.

    • Theodora says:

      Thank you for your insights, Antonio. I can well imagine that Cuban aid is a lot more functional and to-the-bone than the standard Western aid model — I guess one reason we hear so little about it is that they don’t waste any budget on communications projects.