Portugal

During the Salazar years in Portugal the Portuguese group in the island was enlarged by a number of deported dissidents.  Intermarriage has therefore resulted in further ethnic and cultural differences.  As José Ramos-Horta has noted, the Melanesian element binds the nation to the South Pacific, the Malay to South East Asia and the Latin Catholic element to Portugal.

In the distant past the island, a meeting place of Malay and Melanesian ethnic influences, has given the Timorese people a unique appearance.
The first Dominican missionaries came from Goa and were largely responsible for a number of Timorese converting to the Catholic church from their native animist beliefs and practices.  The influence of the church is both unifying and strong, helped by the fact that its clergy impose neither taxes nor retributive punishments.

The confusion which has been revealed to the outside world in the earliest years of the twenty first century, therefore, is an end product of historical, sociological and political factors.  The effects of incursion by other nations can be traced back at least to the fifteenth century when Chinese traders first arrived and settled in  large numbers.  Commerce, both import and export, was primarily controlled by Chinese until the mid-twentieth century.  It was, however, Portuguese who formed the colony as part of their empire, becoming the predominant military, missionary and administrative influence, adding the Portuguese language to the existing melange. Making no effort to change existing tribal or kingdom divisions, their administration was chiefly concerned with urban regions.  So little development had taken place under their rule that in 1939 Dili, capital of East Timor, had no paved roads, water supply, electric power or telephone system.

It was the Portuguese administrators who urged the Dutch authorities from the East Indies, as Indonesia was then known, to take control of the western part of the island after an earthquake in 1653.  It was consolidated as a Dutch colony a hundred years later.  The Dutch colonial approach differed from the Portuguese in being more organised, in forming contracts with the five regional rulers around Kupang and in encouraging local political activity.  One effect of this different control and influence has caused East Timorese to regard West Timor as another country.  When the Dutch withdrew from the whole  East Indian region after World War II in 1949, the western section of the island became part of the newly independent Indonesia.  Yet another  cultural, linguistic and political  incursion had been made into the island.   When in 1942 an Australian military force moved in, hoping to prevent the Japanese movement south,  they made no effort to annexe the country.  Japanese troops came in such numbers, however, that the Australians eventually withdrew, after having been welcomed and helped by many of the mountain people. 

Although there have been subsequent military interventions by Australian troops, the official Australian government attitude to East Timor, one of its closest neighbours, has been influenced by a consciousness of the power of Indonesia in the region.  As has been observed by Richard Woolcott and others, that attitude has been dictated by pragmatism rather than by principle.