A CHRISTIAN ISLAND IN A MOSLEM OCEAN

Dili, Timor-Leste.  East of Bali, west of New Guinea, and north of Australia is an island called Timor.  The western half belongs to Indonesia.  The eastern half did too, but no longer.  There are only two Christian countries in all of Asia.  One is the Philippines.  The other is here, the new nation, independent since 2002 after a horrific struggle, of Timor-Leste or East Timor.[1]

This is a brand-new country, but people have been here for a very, very long time.  They were living at the Jerimalai Cave 42,000 years ago with deep-sea fishing technology. Their descendants still live here today, albeit genetically combined with Malays (from present day Malaysia and Sumatra) over the last few thousand years, and Portuguese over the last 500.

You might wonder how this place became Christian surrounded by the world’s largest Moslem country – Indonesia.  There are over 200 million Moslems in Indonesia which is almost three times the size of Texas, and only 1 million East Timorese on half an island the size of Connecticut.  But it turns out that Christianity came to this part of the world before Islam.

"Timor" is the Malay word for "east" (so, yes, East Timor or Timor-Leste — leste is "east" in Portuguese — means "East East").  It was at the eastern frontier of medieval Hindu-Buddhist island empires like Majapahit (based in Java, it flourished from 1300 to 1500).  As such, it was a backwater where people practiced their animistic spirit-religion and neither Hinduism nor Buddhism ever caught on.

Islam never caught on either.  It came to what is now Indonesia late and by trade, not by the sword, spread by Arab traders and merchants who became rich and married into Hindu-Buddhist royal families.  The first Moslem Sultanate — that of Malacca (from the Arabic malakat, meeting place of merchants) along the Straits of Malacca between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula – wasn’t established until 1400.

Timor is over 1,500 miles east of Malacca.  For the next century, as Malacca flourished, no one on the island ever heard of Islam.  By 1500, the Hindu-Buddhist empire of Majapahit had disintegrated, and in 1511, the Portuguese, led by military genius Afonso de Albuquerque, conquered Malacca.

By 1515, Portuguese traders had settled in Timor to export fragrant sandalwood.  They were soon followed by Dominican friars who built churches and taught Christianity to the Timorese.  They’ve been Roman Catholic ever since. 

To the north of Timor are two groups of islands, the Bandas and the Moluccas – the legendary "Spice Islands" that Columbus tried to find, the only place where grew the spices of pepper, cloves, and nutmeg, so craved by Europeans they were gram for gram far more valuable than gold.  By 1600, the Protestant Dutch were kicking out the Catholic Portuguese and taking over the spice trade in the "East Indies."

By the late 1600s, the Dutch East India Company (Dutch initials VOC) was the richest private company in human history, enabling the colonization of the entire Indonesian archipelago, which became the Dutch East Indies colony run by the Holland government in 1800.  The great failure of the Dutch, however, was in 300 years they could never Christianize their colony.

In 1949, they turned their colony over to the Moslem Javanese elite on the main island of Java.  The Dutch colonial empire was converted into a Moslem Javanese colonial empire called the Republic of Indonesia.  But not on East Timor.

For 200 years, from 1600 to 1800, the Dutch made continual attempts to seize Timor, finally able to gain control over most of the western half, while the Catholic Timorese of the eastern half and a region in the west called Oecussi fought them off.  Thus East Timor with its "exclave" of Oecussi remained a Portuguese colony when the Dutch turned over West Timor and the rest of its colony of 17,508 islands to Indonesia in 1949.

In 1974, a group of Communist military officers staged a coup and took over the government of Portugal in Lisbon.  The coup leaders quickly moved to grant independence to Portugal’s African colonies with no elections, so they could give power to the Communist guerrilla groups within them.

The Communist MPLA, led by Eduardo dos Santos, still runs Angola today.  The Communist FRELIMO movement was given Mozambique, and still dominates it, although it has allowed the RENAMO pro-capitalist party and others to share power.  It was the same in Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tomé, and Cape Verde.  While Bissau is still a dictatorial pit, the latter two have now become far freer.

The Lisbon Communists then attempted to do the same with Portuguese Timor, grant it independence as Timor-Leste and turn exclusive power over to the Communist guerrillas of FRETILIN (Revolutionary Front for Independent Timor-Leste).  In 1975, Fretelin leaders declared Timor-Leste was now an independent state governed by them  The Indonesian military launched a massive air and sea invasion, supported by US President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

By 1976, 35,000 Indonesia troops were occupying East Timor, murdering, raping, and committing atrocities at will.  90% of their weapons were supplied by the US.  East Timor was annexed by Jakarta and a puppet governor installed.  Javanese secret police were everywhere.  A civilian "militia" composed of well-paid West Timorese crushed any hint of resistance by brutal beatings and torture.

Yet the Catholic Timorese continued to resist and fight, especially up in the mountains.  For a quarter-century they never stopped fighting and resisting, with the Indonesian military and its militias murdering well over 100,000.  The Fretelin leaders Jose Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmão abandoned Marxism and joined forces with Catholics and all fellow Timorese.

The turning point came with the Dili Massacre on November 12, 1991 at the Santa Cruz Cemetery just five minutes’ walk from where I’m writing this.  Several thousand Timorese – men, women, and children – gathered there to commemorate the burial of an independence activist, Sebastião Gomes, who had been dragged out of a church and shot in cold blood by Indonesian troops a few days before.

As soldiers began gunning the demonstrators down indiscriminately, two American journalists witnessed the massacre while a Brit videotaped it.  You can watch it in Dili’s Resistance Museum and it will turn your stomach.  It turned the world’s stomach seeing it on TV.  250 people including children were killed.  One of the US journalists had his skull fractured trying to protect his female colleague.

World-wide support for East Timor grew.  Jose Ramos-Horta and Roman Catholic Bishop Ximenes Belo were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996. Finally in 1999, Bill Clinton cut off all military aid to Indonesia, and secured the release of Xanana Gusmão from prison in Jakarta.  Clinton also talked Jakarta into allowing a Referendum conducted by the UN, giving East Timorese the choice of whether they wanted "special autonomy for East Timor within the unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia."

In the runup to the vote on August 30, 1999, the bribes and promises to vote yes were massive, while the threats and intimidation against voting no – for a No vote meant a vote for independence – were even more so.  With a 98% turnout of registered voters, 21.5% (94,388) voted yes, 78.5% (344,580) voted no.

The Indonesian military and their militias went on a berserk rampage of revenge and utter terror, with thousands killed, butchered, raped, and brutalized – including a number of priests and nuns.  300,000 were driven into West Timor as homeless refugees.  Homes, roads, hospitals, irrigation systems, and the country’s whole electric grid were destroyed.

Clinton and Australia PM John Howard demanded a UN and Australian-led peacekeeping force to shut the militias down and evacuate the Indonesian military.  By October the force was there and a UN transitional government set up.  Jakarta relinquished its claim.  East Timor became formally independent on May 20, 2002 and Xanana Gusmão elected president.

So – it’s now eleven years later.  Does this story have a happy ending?  First, you’ve got to love a guy who calls himself Xanana (Gusmão’s given name is José Alexandre).  Remember the Golden Oldie from 1957, "Get A Job" by the Silhouettes?  And surely you remember a rock group who had their own TV show in the 70s that named themselves after the refrain in "Get A Job" – Sha Na Na.

Yes, Gusmão named himself after Sha Na Na (‘X’ in Portuguese is ‘Sh’ in English).  Now that’s a politician with a true sense of humor!  He’s currently East Timor’s Prime Minister.

Let’s look at the good news.  This is a peaceful, stable, beautiful place. I haven’t seen a single soldier.  Everyone is relaxed and friendly – even the guards at the Presidential Palace or the Parliament Building.  I walked around taking pictures, and they just smiled and waved at me.  They only had sidearms.

The scuba diving is among the best in the world.  I can’t recall dive sites anywhere else where I’ve seen as much diversity in corals, fish, and critters as here. 

East Timor has averaged 11.8% GDP annual growth over the last five years.  The per capita income is $8,700.  Personal income and corporate taxes are capped at a max of 10%.  The government has a massive surplus.  How so?  Oil.  East Timor produces about 80,000 bpd (barrels per day) of sweet crude. And in cooperation with Australia it’s finding ever-larger reserves in the Timor Sea.

Further, in 2005 it created one of the best sovereign wealth funds in the world, based on Norway’s, called the Petroleum Fund, that currently has over $11 billion – yes, eleven billion for a population of one million – and the government is permitted to spend quite restricted amounts of it in excess of the fund’s interest earnings.

What’s the bad news?  The government doesn’t know how to spend the money.  The roads are ghastly – it can take you all day to get to the other side of the island.  Half the population lives off subsistence farming up in the mountains and in extreme poverty.  Malnutrition of children is rampant – although I never saw kids with distended bellies like all over Africa.

Saddest of all to me is the lack of understanding of capitalism, or private business.  This is not a leftie socialist country, but there is that suspiciousness of the market, or entrepreneurs that you see in so many other countries.  Plus the Timorese are still in a shell-shocked PTSD state after the horrors of Indonesia.  So they are reluctant to trust anyone, thinking that they’ll try to take them over – and that includes foreign investors.

Tourism could flourish here, but it’s moribund.  The hotels are 1-star.   No beach resorts.  The bars are backpacker funky.  The whole place is shabby.  And they’re swimming in an ocean of oil, sitting on a mountain of cash, living in a tropical paradise – or would be a paradise if they’d allow entrepreneurial development.

This is a decent Christian country of decent Christian people, who were willing to fight and suffer hideously to achieve their freedom, which they did.  Theirs is a heroic saga – and made even more inspirational by its impact on Indonesia.  Indonesians, by and large as there will always be plenty of Islamic crazies out of 200 million, have seen the error of their brutal and dictatorial ways.  Indonesia is fast becoming a stable, peaceful democracy, content to let East Timor be a sovereign Christian island in its Moslem sea.

Let’s hope the East Timorese can overcome their PTSD and suspicion of foreign private business.  Let’s root for our fellow Christians here to flourish.  I sure am.

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[1] .  Armenia and Georgia are technically in geographical Asia but consider themselves part of Europe.  They are among the oldest Christian nations in the world.  Christianity is expanding so rapidly in South Korea it may someday become predominantly Christian.