On 20 May 2022, Timor-Leste marked the twentieth anniversary of its formal independence — the culmination of a struggle against Indonesian occupation that cost between 100,000 and 250,000 lives and lasted nearly a quarter of a century. It is, by any measure, one of the most remarkable stories of national survival in modern history. A small, poor country, colonised first by Portugal for three hundred years and then invaded by Indonesia in 1975, emerging two decades later as the only nation rated “free” by Freedom House in the entirety of Southeast Asia. The flags went up in Dili. The old independence leaders — Xanana Gusmão and Nobel laureate José Ramos-Horta among them — returned to power. The world, briefly, paid attention.
The story of how Timor-Leste got here matters, because it was not inevitable. Indonesia invaded in 1975 with the tacit approval of the United States and Australia, who regarded the Fretilin independence movement with suspicion and Indonesia as a useful Cold War ally. The international community looked away as Indonesian forces and their paramilitary allies systematically killed, tortured and displaced the Timorese population. By the 1990s, international pressure was slowly building — the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, in which Indonesian troops opened fire on mourners at a funeral, was filmed and broadcast around the world. The fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 changed the political calculations in Jakarta. In 1999, the United Nations administered a referendum in which the Timorese people voted by almost eighty percent for independence. In response, Indonesian military-backed paramilitaries conducted a scorched earth campaign — burning buildings, killing civilians, displacing half the population. A multinational peacekeeping force, led by Australia, eventually restored order. In 2002, independence was formalised.
What followed has been, against all expectations, a genuine democratic success. Regular elections, peaceful transfers of power, a free press, and a level of institutional stability that countries with far greater resources have failed to achieve. Timor-Leste is poor and faces significant challenges around economic development, the depletion of its oil revenues, and a youth population whose expectations outpace available opportunities. But it is free. And its people chose their own leaders. That is not a small thing.
Which makes the contrast with West Papua almost unbearable to sit with. The two territories share a history in ways that are not coincidental. Both were occupied by Indonesia. Both mounted decades-long resistance movements. Both suffered systematic human rights abuses at the hands of Indonesian security forces — massacres, torture, disappearances, the suppression of any expression of national identity. In Timor-Leste, the international community eventually acted. A referendum was held. The occupier was obliged to leave. In West Papua, none of that has happened. The 1969 Act of Free Choice — in which fewer than 1,100 hand-picked representatives voted to transfer the territory to Indonesian control, under military duress, without the participation of the Papuan people — remains the only consultation that has ever taken place. The UN accepted it.
In March 2022, three UN Special Rapporteurs issued a joint statement expressing serious concern about the deteriorating human rights situation in West Papua, citing what they described as shocking abuses by Indonesian security forces, including extrajudicial killings, the shooting of children, enforced disappearances, torture, and the forced displacement of at least 5,000 indigenous Papuans in a single eight-month period. Between 60,000 and 100,000 people have been internally displaced since violence escalated in 2018.
Foreign journalists and independent human rights monitors remain systematically denied access to the territory — a restriction the Indonesian government has maintained for decades, and which ensures that what happens there is documented largely through the work of local community journalists operating at considerable personal risk. More than 300,000 West Papuans are internally displaced, the territory is under accelerating military occupation, and the international community that found the will to act in Timor-Leste has shown no comparable will in West Papua.
Benny Wenda and the ULMWP have pointed to Timor-Leste repeatedly as both an inspiration and an indictment. If the international community could act in one case, it can act in another. The parallels are not abstract. Both peoples endured the same occupier, the same language of development used to justify dispossession, the same systematic violence against those who dared to raise a flag or speak the word independence.
In Timor-Leste, the world eventually decided that enough was enough. The difference was not the severity of the suffering — by any measure, West Papua’s has been comparable or worse. The difference was attention, and the political calculations of powerful governments who decided, at a particular moment in history, that intervention served their interests.
