Governor Flees: Portuguese Timor's Turning Point

The Portuguese governor of Timor abandoned the capital Dili and fled to the offshore island of Atauro as rebel forces seized control of the territory in August 1975. Portugal had held the eastern half of Timor Island for over four hundred years, making it one of the oldest European colonial possessions in Asia. The Carnation Revolution in Lisbon in April 1974 had toppled the Portuguese dictatorship, and the new democratic government began decolonizing its empire. In East Timor, three political factions emerged: Fretilin, which advocated independence; UDT, which favored continued association with Portugal; and APODETI, which supported integration with Indonesia. When UDT launched a coup in August 1975, Fretilin counterattacked and won, seizing the capital and declaring independence on November 28. Portugal's retreat created a power vacuum that Indonesia had been waiting for. President Suharto's government, with tacit American and Australian approval, launched a full-scale military invasion on December 7, 1975. The occupation lasted twenty-four years and killed an estimated one hundred thousand to one hundred eighty thousand Timorese through military operations, famine, and disease in a territory with a pre-invasion population of roughly 630,000. The genocide, proportionally one of the worst of the twentieth century, received minimal international attention until the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, when Indonesian soldiers opened fire on a funeral procession and the footage was smuggled out by journalists. East Timor finally gained independence in 2002, after a UN-supervised referendum in 1999 in which the population voted overwhelmingly to separate from Indonesia.