UnSubRocky wrote on Sep 8
th, 2019 at 10:38am:
Well, East Timor seems to be a basketcase country that is reliant on the world to keep their country afloat. And Australia seems to be the country that has to bail out the East Timorese. It seems realistic that we collect the profits from oil revenue that is in the East Timor region.
Do you have any understanding as to why it may well be "a basketcase" country?
In terms of their own independence and thus ability to run things on their own, they are a toddler. It was colonised by the Portuguese in the 16th century and was run by them up until 1975, with a few years in between of Japanese occupation. After that the Indonesians took over, and when independence occurred, the Indonesians destroyed just about everything they could.
There is for instance still a belief that the Dili National Hospital is not somewhere you want to go, more people go to the clinic a US doctor set up in the 1980s. This was because during the occupation the Indonesian military would routinely patrol the hospital looking for resistance fighters who may have been injured to round up and shoot.
Even outside assistance is a pain in the ass, in that we don't give them enough help to completely solve a problem. Plus everything is interlinked. E.g the education is lagging behind, because the children only do 4.5 hours of schooling and get out at 1 pm. Why? because they have to help their parents with the subsistence farming, or their shops etc, this is because the profits are so low, they can't afford to hire people, so unemployment is high. Because its subsistence farming, the nutrition is poor, so not only is there physical retardation, there is also mental retardation, which then feeds back into hte education system.
Its not an easy path for Timor Leste (I single handedly refuse to use East Timor. But to suggest its a basketcase speaks to the usual first world mentality surrounding developing nations.