After good many years living mostly in obscurity and cut off from international public opinion, an isolation only briefly broken by echoes of such extraordinary events as the Santa Cruz massacre (whose film footage made by Max Stahl had a lasting impact after 1991) or the bestowing of the Nobel Peace Prize (1996) on two illustrious sons of the country – José Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo – Timor-Leste caught the attention of the world in 1999 when its people voted in a UN-sponsored selfdetermination referendum to break away from the Republic of Indonesia, which was followed by widespread rampage carried out by integrationist militias backed by the Indonesian military. The UN moved in under the floodlights of international scrutiny for a transitional period that ended on 20 May 2002, with a proclamation of independence and the birth of a democratic nation – a story most often portrayed as a major success. In the following years, Timor-Leste faded away from the limelight, only to reappear at times mostly because of political upheaval that threatened the consolidation of democracy (such as the 2006 political crisis that required new forms of international intervention, or the failed attempt on the life of President Ramos-Horta in February 2008), neither of which signified the interruption of the constitutional rule of law.

At a time when similar experiments of democracy-building are being carried out elsewhere (an example that jumps to mind is South Sudan), to examine the political history of independent Timor-Leste can illuminate problems of democratic consolidation in young, poor and post-conflict countries without previous experience with democracy.

One of the innovations brought to the public arena by the case of Timor-Leste was the decision to embark simultaneously in a process of state-building and democracy-building (Tansey 2009). If in abstract, theoretical terms, there is no contradiction between those two processes, they are nevertheless interconnected and impinge one on the other (Linz and Stepan 1996: 24-28). Alas, in the real world not all good things always go together, and the promotion of democracy may, and often does, entail the establishment of conflicting objectives with other concurring projects. Timor-Leste could not escape this fate. Clashes of objectives can occur as an intrinsic feature of democracy-building, when two or more goals that fall under this header are in such a situation that the achievement of one of them is impaired by the prosecution of the other.