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Timor-Leste (often called East Timor in the English-speaking world) is one of the world's newest and smallest nations. Its one million people occupy the eastern half of a small island at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, a few hundred kilometres from Australia's northern coastline. Timor-Leste is at present the poorest country in Asia and one of the poorest in the world, despite having rich offshore oil and gas fields in the sea that separates it from Australia. Timor-Leste achieved its independence only in 2002, after a long and brutal occupation by the Indonesian military dictatorship of General Suharto, who invaded East Timor in 1975. Suharto aimed at preventing the island from achieving independence following the collapse of the previous occupying power, the fascist regime of Portugal, which had ruled East Timor for nearly 500 years. The current abject poverty in which 44 per cent of Timorese now live (UNDP 2006) is a direct result of those two colonial occupations, which plundered the natural and human resources of the country and maintained the Timorese in a state of total economic and political dependency (Dunn 1996).
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