Introduction

At midnight on 19 May 2002, in the presence of Kofi Annan, the United Nations General Secretary, East Timor became a democratic republic. This auspicious event saw the creation of one of the world's newest states and represented an important marker in the liberal statebuilding process that hoped to end a period of ‘western duplicity and self-interest with a brutal Third World dictatorship that had consigned East Timor to almost twenty-five years of systematic killing, gratuitous violence and primitive plunder’. Indeed the events driving foreign occupation of East Timorese history have been far from constructive for the nascent state and its population. The period following colonial occupation has consisted primarily of a succession of occupations and civil war that have impoverished and traumatised the tiny population of this tropical island.

A Portuguese colony from the eighteenth century, East Timor suffered Japanese occupation in the Second World War and then, from 1975, Indonesian domination and a civil war that culminated in eventual intervention of the UN in 1999 and InterFET (International Force East Timor) during and after the violent withdrawal of pro-Indonesian militias. The UN missions in East Timor; UNAMET (1999), UNTAET (1999–2002), UNMISET (2002–5) and UNOTIL (2005–6) were peacekeeping and statebuilding projects, variously described as ‘governance or national-building missions’, intended to end the civil war and years of foreign oppression through the creation of liberal peace and the construction of an independent liberal democratic state in East Timor.