East Timor, now Timor Leste, did it. And it did it almost twice. 

The former Portuguese colony proclaimed its independence on Nov. 30, 1975, at 10 p.m., only to be invaded 144 hours later, yet restored it after 24 years of war, occupation and struggle. 

On that very day when independence was declared, “I kept my eyes looking toward the sea and my ears toward the air [because] who knows, the Indonesian army might come and attack us,” then-president Francisco Xavier do Amaral told me in 1995.

Indonesia, too, has gone through a similar course of events. It took momentous decades and struggle to achieve independence, and declared it in 1945 only to face a Dutch attempt to recolonize the country.

However, when the people of East Timor voted in a United Nations-held independence referendum on Aug. 30, 1999, they faced a wave of violence — much of which I witnessed. Like the 1975 invasion, it is a violation of the historic Asia-African solidarity born in the Bandung conference in 1955. The nation almost lost its freedom as the Indonesian army-trained militias kept threatening them.

A number of events — against the backdrop of international criticism, economic and trade sanctions — resulted in the referendum. 

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