East Timor, or the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (Timor-Leste: from Malay Timor and Portuguese leste, both meaning "east"), is a country in Southeast Asia comprising the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecussi-Ambeno, an exclave on the northwestern side of the island, within Indonesian West Timor. The small country of 5,376 square miles (14,609 square kilometres) is located about 400 miles (640 km) northwest of Darwin, Australia.
The name "Timor" derives from timur, the word for "east" in Indonesian and Malay which became Timor in Portuguese. The Portuguese name Timor-Leste (pron. IPA: [ti'moɾ 'lɛʃtɨ]) and the unofficial Tetum name Timór Lorosa'e are sometimes used in English. Lorosa'e (the word for "east" in Tetum) literally means "rising sun".
Colonized by Portugal in the sixteenth century, East Timor was known as Portuguese Timor for centuries. It was invaded and occupied by Indonesia in 1975 and declared the country's 27th province the following year. Following the 1999 UN-sponsored act of self-determination that year, Indonesia relinquished control of the territory and East Timor became the first new sovereign state of the twenty-first century and of the third millennium on May 20, 2002. Alongside the Philippines, East Timor is one of only two predominantly Roman Catholic countries in Asia, and the only Portuguese-speaking sovereign state in Asia (although Portuguese is also official in the Chinese special administrative region of Macau).
At $800, East Timor has one of the lowest per capita GDP (Purchasing Power Parity adjusted) in the world. Its Human Development Index (HDI), however, corresponds to a medium degree of human development and places East Timor 142nd among the world's nations.
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