East Timor: Ten Years On

Veterans, widows, children who never knew their fathers—all gathered on the red-earth hills overlooking the blue seas of the Wetar Straits. Before them, two dozen flag-draped coffins, very small, clearly designed to carry only a few bones each. For these families, this was a day of both great pain and great pride.

Ten years ago their tiny nation, East Timor, voted for and eventually won its independence from Indonesia after decades of often brutal occupation. The coffins contained the remains of Timorese guerilla fighters felled in battle, gathered from ad hoc burial plots across the country and brought here to be interred as martyrs at East Timor's Metinaro war memorial, a vast and awe-inspiring series of terraced graves climbing up the hillside. Only the hymns of the Catholic mass were able to cover up the wails of grief from survivors for whom even the reward of victory was insufficient consolation.

East Timor's leaders, Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao and President Jose Ramos Horta, stood alongside the rows of caskets. Once a rebel leader and exiled activist, respectively, they were now flanked by dignitaries from around the world—a reminder that although this country is small, it still carries great symbolic weight for its famed battle for independence. Moral support during the Indonesian occupation has also given way to a new kind of attention from the international community: a huge amount of foreign aid, some say as much as 5 billion dollars, as East Timor struggles to its feet as an independent nation.

The definition of what East Timor is, or what it is becoming, can be hard. Public events and press conferences are often held in three languages—Portuguese, the local language of Tetun, and English; electric sockets in government ministries can be Indonesian, Australian or even English (and sometimes all three in a single room); in the shops of the capital, Dili, the beer is Australian, the wine Portuguese and the bottled water Indonesian. Timorese culture finds itself generationally divided between the elders, who remember being part of Portugal, a middle tier exposed to the cultural assimilation efforts of Jakarta, and a new group, mostly children still, that are growing up in the middle of one of the greatest international nation-building experiments ever attempted.

Beyond culture there are severe challenges ahead, ones that even the best efforts of the international community, and a decent domestic warchest derived from East Timor's petroleum wealth, have not yet addressed. This is still the poorest country in Asia and it finds itself stuck at the bottom of many of the main developmental indexes worldwide. It's clear a lot of work still lies ahead.

(This is part of the Fragile States project, a joint initiative of the Pulitzer Center, the Bureau for International Reporting and NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.)