Introduction

This chapter examines the way martyrs of the independence struggle are remembered in the independent nation of Timor-Leste. It examines the changing definitions of martyrdom during the Portuguese and Indonesian colonial eras, and beyond independence, through an examination of changing patterns of memorialisation, commemoration, and cultural heritage. It also examines how the concept of martyrdom has becomes a site of struggles for official recognition in the post-independence state, with frequently strong distinctions between the type of state recognition afforded to military resistance veterans and to civilian victims of human rights abuses.

In the pantheon of East Timorese nationalism, monuments to ‘martyrs’ of the national liberation are a major feature of the sacralised landscape. These form part of the cultural heritage of the independence struggle, and are one element of the ‘difficult memories’ (Leach 2009) associated with massacre sites, as well as places of political imprisonment, torture, and human rights abuses. Few post-conflict societies have experienced so profound a loss of life as Timor-Leste as a proportion of population, having suffered an estimated minimum 102,000 casualties during the Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1999, along with forced population displacements and extensive nonfatal human rights violations through arbitrary detention, torture and rape (CAVR 2005, 43). A generation earlier, an estimated 60,000 East Timorese were killed in the course of the Japanese occupation of Portuguese Timor from 1942 to 1945. Monuments to martyrs of both occupations are present in the East Timorese memorial landscape, as well as to the short-lived but deeply divisive civil war in August 1975. In this regard, martyrs are also central to the story of evolving conceptions of political community in Timor-Leste.