Timor Leste (or East Timor)
The separation of East and West Timor was caused firstly by Europeans, when during colonization times, Dutch governed the Western part and Portugues the Easter part of the island. The sudden exit of Europeans after the 1st World War, lead to internal political interests and conflicts to this piece of land. Timor Leste is known for one of the most bloody war the history has seen (1/4 of the East Timor nation was killed 20 years ago).
In capital Dili, you may find yourself even feeling like in one of the European towns. Dili is inhabited by many Westerners with a mission to protect vulnerable freedom and peace of Timor Leste.
We had allocated a week to visit the whole island of Timor, but, due to very interesting places found in West Timor and to unpredictable but expectable bus delays, we ended up staying in Timor-Leste just one day and a half. We entered by land, crossing 60 km of many little villages and suburbs, which in the end felt like we saw much more of the reality to various United Nations peacekeepers settled in the capital and never getting out.
From what we have seen crossing the Timor island from West to East by the land, everybody lives in peace and there is no any war now but the situation is very moving and saddening because of other reasons and Western peacekeepers themselves.
Dili (the capital) looked clean, well developed, with plenty of beautiful restaurants and tourists / U.N. peacekeeping personnel around. Most of the tourists (mainly Europeans) come for a short stay, just to prolong their regular 30-days Indonesian visa and then run back to Bali. Everything was way more expensive in Dili than in Indonesia. However, the villages outside the city look painfully poor (in comparison, much poorer than Indonesian West Timor). The country seems to import everything and not to produce anything on its own. The city hosts plenty of Western peacekeepers, museums are equipped with libraries with the most expensive Macbooks you can find in the market, though no single local person visits the place. Instead, local people outside seem to be close to starving conditions.
Whatever your opinion about the process that leads to this situation, the final result of the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives is inconfutably this: in the countryside, people are as poor as a poor African country, while their western neighbours, of same ethnicity and culture, who have never had anything against them anyway, live in peace and relative wealth. And in the capital, westerners discuss international politics while eating expensive imported cheese, earning huge expat salaries, claiming they are doing some sort of charity, while the whole country keeps getting more dependent on them than independent, and statistics looks good only because more service is created by westerners to serve the same westerners, while local people outside the capital almost starve.
It would be interesting to spend some more time and understand the situation more in detail, this was our first impression.
Besides politics and businesses of peacekeepers, the nature, as all around Indonesia is breathtaking.
