JAKARTA: Timor-Leste’s admission to Asean in October 2025 brought to an end a long wait that began with its application in 2011. For Indonesia and Timor-Leste, though, the significance goes beyond accession itself.
Their relationship has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Indonesia occupied East Timor from 1975 to 1999.
The popular consultation that ended Indonesian rule was followed by violence, separation and a difficult transition to independence. Yet within a relatively short period, Dili and Jakarta had begun to build a close working relationship, with Jakarta becoming one of the strongest advocates of Timor-Leste’s Asean bid.
Timor-Leste now sits in Asean alongside the country from which it separated little more than a generation ago. The Asean membership now will reinforce that partnership, but will also make it easier for the governments to leave the past unaddressed.
After the restoration of independence in 2002, relations between Dili and Jakarta gradually became more settled, even as demands for justice over past abuses remained unresolved.
Geography and economic interdependence gave both governments strong reasons to maintain stable relations. Timor-Leste shares a border with Indonesia, while trade, movement and family ties continue across it.
Timorese leaders also made a deliberate choice: Xanana Gusmão, among others, initiated a discreet but steady rapprochement towards Indonesia.
Frequent high-level contact and the establishment of the 2005 Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF) brought the two governments closer, although accountability remained limited. As both governments focus much on functional cooperation on trade, connectivity, border management, the violence of 1999 now seems to recede from much of the official agenda.
Asean membership now places that relationship within a wider regional setting. Timor-Leste no longer approaches South-East Asia as an applicant dependent on the consent of existing members. It participates in Asean institutions, ministerial meetings and regional negotiations in its own right.
Indonesia remains its largest and most important neighbour, and the imbalance in size, resources and influence remains considerable. With an Asean membership, Dili now has more space to develop relations across South-East Asia, so that Indonesia no longer dominates its regional engagement.
For instance, Malaysia pushed through Timor-Leste formal admission during its 2025 Chairmanship. Singapore, once among the most hesitant members, is now one of its most active providers of capacity building support.
Broader regional ties, however, are unlikely to change how Dili and Jakarta handle their shared past. Asean’s preference for gradualism, restraint and quiet diplomacy sits comfortably with a relationship in which difficult historical questions have largely been kept away from day-to-day political engagement.
Nor does the region offer much of an alternative venue. The Asean Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights can raise flags to remind these unresolved histories, but its mandate does not extend to investigating those abuses.
That is where Timor-Leste’s membership raises a more difficult issue. Regionalism can give former adversaries regular ways of working together and place their relationship within a broader set of shared interests.
It can also make an incomplete political settlement appear more settled than it is. Governments may move on institutionally while victims, families and unresolved questions of responsibility remain outside the main political conversation.
Nearly two decades after the 2005 Commission of Truth and Friendship was established, some of those questions remain open. The CTF report in 2008 concluded that Indonesian military, police and civilian authorities bore institutional responsibility for gross human rights violations in 1999.
It recommended, among other things, a commission to trace disappeared persons, a documentation centre and support for survivors. These issues remain part of the relationship between Indonesia and Timor-Leste even if they now receive less attention in official diplomacy.
Indonesian politics adds a further constraint: President Prabowo Subianto served in East Timor as a special forces officer during the occupation, which is likely to make Jakarta more reluctant to revisit the period.
Timor-Leste’s first year in Asean therefore brings the unfinished character of reconciliation into sharper view. Regional cooperation between Dili and Jakarta will continue to deepen, and the political incentives on both sides favour that direction.
Asean may push the past further towards the margins of the bilateral relationship, but it need not. Both governments could use the regional setting to finish the CTF’s outstanding work: opening archives, tracing the disappeared and supporting families still searching for relatives across the border.
Doing so within Asean would give that work wider visibility and credibility. It would show that reconciliation between Dili and Jakarta extends to the past as well as the present.
The question now is whether memory, responsibility and unresolved claims can keep a place in a relationship increasingly conducted through the language and routines of regional cooperation. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
- Khoo Ying Hooi is an associate professor at Universiti Malaya. Melinda Martinus is a fellow at the ASEAN Studies Centre at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.
