Indonesia invades East Timor after the declaration of independence

São Tomé and Príncipe became independent after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution opened negotiations with African liberation movements. The islands’ colonial economy had relied on plantation labor under...

Papua New Guinea became independent after being administered by Australia, first as a League of Nations mandate and then as a UN trust territory. Independence involved hundreds of language communities...

Angola became independent as Portuguese rule ended, but rival liberation movements—the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA—contested control and foreign powers intervened. Independence followed a long war against...

Suriname left the Kingdom of the Netherlands and became a sovereign republic. The transition followed decades of anticolonial debate and the 1954 Charter’s limited autonomy; it was accelerated by...

After Portugal’s withdrawal and a breakdown in negotiations with rival Timorese parties, FRETILIN declared the Democratic Republic of East Timor. The declaration asserted self-determination after...