East Timor: A Historical Singularity

• Authors: Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

During the 24 years of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, to talk about its cultural individuality as a product of its history - focusing on what set it apart from Indonesia - was an act likely to raise suspicions of some kind of manipulation of history for political purposes. Naturally, the same suspicions could fall on anyone assuming an opposite view, that is a view that valued the connection uniting the two peoples and discarded what separated them. In this paper, we adhere more to the first perspective. Obviously, we are not driven by the desire to prove that East Timor had to be, a priori, independent; this is by no means the task of a historian. We are simply trying to explain, a posteriori, why, in the referendum of 30 August 1999, the people of East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence

Keywords

EN

East Timor; Independence; Political maps; Linguistic and religious identity

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human and Social Studies
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 13-43

Dates

published

2014-10-01

online

2015-01-16

Contributors

author

Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz

• Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Avenida de Berna, 26-C / 1069-061 Lisbon, Portugal

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/hssr-2013-0036