A year ago, The Tablet’s Ireland correspondent returned to an island at the southern extreme of the Malay Archipelago, two decades after the inconclusive ending of a brutal war

If the past is another country, as they say, East Timor underscored this by renaming itself the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste when it became fully independent in May 2002. Journeying between the past and the present is a theme of my radio documentary, Timor-Leste: Coming of Age, which airs this weekend on RTE Radio 1. It follows a journey of remembrance I undertook last year, retracing my first visit to East Timor 20 years ago in March and April of 1999. On 30 August that year, the people of the territory voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia in a UN-sponsored referendum. After 24 years of brutal occupation, which had resulted in 200,000 Timorese deaths from war, famine and poverty, the clear result held out the possibility of a new beginning.

While I was in East Timor in 1999, two things happened which will forever tie me to this land. One was the Liquiçá church massacre, which occurred on 6 April 1999 – one of a series of atrocities that had begun when Indonesia invaded in 1975 and only ended when the last Indonesian battalion left in late-1999: the CIA has described the genocide in East Timor as one of the worst of the twentieth century.