DILI, East Timor (THE WASHINGTON POST) – “For so long, nobody paid attention to us,” Xanana Gusmao, the prime minister of East Timor, said during an interview in the capital Dili.
Two decades ago, freedom fighters on a mountainous island in southern Indonesia won a long, bloody struggle against a corrupt military regime, establishing East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, the first independent state of the 21st century. Memories of airstrikes and indiscriminate killings are still fresh here. And they’ve led the country’s leaders to take an unusual interest in another fight for freedom in Southeast Asia.
In 2021, a group of generals overturned an elected government in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, starting a civil war that some conflict monitoring groups consider the most extreme in the world today. Many countries have looked away – much as they did for 24 years, East Timor’s leaders say, as Indonesian soldiers fought Timorese independence fighters.
Gusmao led the insurgency against the Indonesian military, later serving two terms as East Timor’s president and, now, his second as prime minister. At 77, with a head of white hair and a stiff back from years of imprisonment, he still remembers every person he saw killed or tortured in the jungles of Timor, he said.
“I do not accept the suffering of the Burmese people,” Gusmao said. “I cannot.”
Many in East Timor, even opposition politicians and civil society leaders critical of Gusmao on other issues, said in interviews that they agree. The country of 1.3 million, with an economy one-seventh the size of Vermont, has gone further than almost any other in supporting the Myanmar resistance, receiving its leaders as state representatives and openly advocating on their behalf at international forums. In the coming months, East Timor will let Myanmar pro-democracy groups open offices in the country to help coordinate resistance activities and take in a number of political refugees, officials say.
Increasingly, human rights activists say they see Dili as a voice of conscience, challenging more powerful countries that have been too distracted or too divided to press for change in Myanmar. “What the Timorese are doing is vital,” said Debbie Stothard, a Malaysian rights advocate.
