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.

Once word got round to the folks back home, they too flocked there, and to Bridgwater, as I found when I first started travelling by coach to Taunton from London. Indeed, many of them commute to Taunton from Bridgwater. I recognise the language they speak, Tetum, an Austronesian or Malayo-Polynesian language, with many words from Portuguese, as well as Indonesian, their ability to speak Portuguese, Indonesian or English varying. Earlier this year, Google Translate added Tetum as one of the languages it now supports, so you can see what the Lib Dem website looks like in it.

Ah yes, but what about Brexit? Unfortunately, while many were still arriving in the transition period before Covid stopped travel everywhere, the Portuguese embassy in Dili hadn’t told them what it was and how it would affect them, unlike the one in London. Whereas there had always been some confusion in the UK about whether the Portuguese passports they held were genuine, Brexit exacerbated this, as did language difficulties when applying for settled status.

However, with a long established network of family and friends, the East Timorese in the UK are still less vulnerable than the Indonesians who have come to work on farms, only to find themselves out of work only a few weeks later, and heavily in debt, having paid thousands of pounds in illegal fees. While Indonesia has a sizeable embassy in London, having to help exploited migrant workers is a more recent development for it than its counterparts in Riyadh or Kuala Lumpur.

It seems strange to remember when no such country as Timor Leste existed, much less one to commemorate Santa Cruz with a public holiday, or statue of a young man tending to his dying friend.

But it exists now, and while many of its people may live and work around the UK, they can return home in the knowledge that they will not face persecution, and nor will their families.

Timor Leste’s embassy in London, only opened in 2014, may have fewer citizens to keep tabs on than Indonesia’s, but their remittances are an important source of income, alongside oil revenues. The British embassy in Dili was closed in 2006, but while the previous government’s plans to reopen it, as part of an ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’, might be mocked as yet another Brexit delusion, it would be a welcome development, and one that the new government should pursue.

* Ken Westmoreland is a member of the Taunton and Wellington Local Party.