Tag Archives: timor leste

12 November in Timor Leste or East Timor, is National Youth Day, which commemorates the massacre of dozens of young pro-independence activists by Indonesian troops in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili in 1991. Like Sharpeville in South Africa in 1960, during the struggle against apartheid, Santa Cruz was a pivotal event in highlighting atrocities in the former Portuguese colony, which Indonesia had invaded and occupied in 1975, declaring it the Republic’s 27th province.

Back then, I was in correspondence with Lord Avebury, previously the Liberal MP Eric Lubbock, a supporter of East Timor’s right to self-determination, in the years when it seemed a lost cause. Yet by 1999, things in Jakarta had changed, with it agreeing to a UN supervised referendum, in which 78 per cent voted for independence, though the backlash from Indonesian-backed militias saw most of the infrastructure destroyed. This led to the deployment of the Australian-led InterFET peacekeeping force, to which the UK contributed the HMS Glasgow and the Gurkha regiment in Brunei.

Many of the young activists I met living in exile in the UK and Ireland would return home after independence in 2002, becoming parliamentarians, ministers, diplomats or civil servants, with others joining NGOs. However, there was a flow of people out of the country, for economic reasons, just as there were in the Philippines, and even Indonesia; unlike citizens of those countries, however, the East Timorese had the advantage of being entitled to Portuguese, and hence EU, citizenship, which at the time, enabled them to live and work in the UK without needing work permits.

As a result, East Timorese migrant communities sprung up in towns around the UK, like Oxford, Peterborough and Crewe, as well as Dungannon in Northern Ireland, which I visited in 2006, nicknaming it ‘New Dili’. While the Republic was far more supportive of their homeland’s struggle for independence than the UK, as a small nation itself, it was Northern Ireland, or rather the Moy Park chicken factory in Dungannon, which proved a far greater pull than Dublin.