Lee Kim Chew – East Timor's newly-elected President Xanana Gusmao, a poet and freedom fighter, loves the Portuguese language. It gives him a sense of identity.
Like many East Timorese who fought the Indonesians for independence, he draws inspiration from the historical past to face the future.
East Timorese look to Portugal, their colonial masters for four centuries, because it is the Portuguese roots that keep them distinct from the Indonesians who annexed their homeland in 1976.
This is why the newly-independent East Timorese have adopted Portuguese as one of the country's official languages, even though only 17 per cent of the people speak the language and 63 per cent speak Bahasa Indonesia. There was once also talk of adopting the Portuguese escudo as the new currency.
For East Timorese, all this is necessary to make a clean break with the past because speaking in Bahasa Indonesia and using the rupiah are painful reminders of Jakarta's brutal rule during the Suharto years.
But East Timor risks being a historical oddity in South-east Asia if it harks back too much to history. It will hamper its integration in South-east Asia and make the difficult task of reconciliation with Indonesia even more intractable.
East Timor will be formally independent on May 20 when United Nations administrators hand over the running of the terrority to the country's newly-elected leaders.
Sadly, the world's newest nation will also be among the world's poorest. Many of its 738,000 people are malnourished and jobless.
The most urgent question now is whether independent East Timor can stand on its own feet. Laid to waste by pro-Indonesia militiamen after the 1999 independence vote, it is starting from scratch.
The World Bank estimates that it will cost up to US$300 million in the next three years to rebuild the ravaged country. It now subsists on foreign aid. Foreign donors pumped some US$300 million into the country last year, but this will dwindle to US$55 million in 2004, well before East Timor can generate its own funds from offshore oil and gas reserves.
To complicate matters, it is locked in a bitter dispute with Australia over the share of revenues from gas fields in the Timor Sea. The dispute may torpedo the Timor Sea Treaty they signed last July to exploit the oil reserves that could provide East Timor with US$180 million in annual royalties over 20 years.
There is little to speak of East Timor's nascent economy. Its other main hopes are in coffee exports and eco-tourism, but both are barely developed.
East Timor is toying with the idea of joining Asean. This, perhaps, is its best hope of getting the economy off the ground. But Asean membership is a distant prospect and will not happen unless the Indonesians say yes.
To start with, the border between East Timor and Indonesia's western half of the island, where pro-Jakarta militiamen roam freely, is still a no-man's land. Which is why UN peacekeepers are needed. And some 50,000 East Timorese are languishing in refugee camps in West Timor.
Also, Indonesian military leaders are still smarting over the loss of East Timor, and they are unhappy that several senior officers have been put on trial for human-rights abuses there.
General Wiranto, the former military chief, blames the UN for the killings in East Timor after the 1999 plebiscite. In his book Goodbye East Timor, he writes: 'There are a few people who are proud to see Indonesia as the second country in the world, after Yugoslavia, where a rights tribunal is being held to try military and police personnel, ignoring their dedication to their country.'
His sentiment is widely shared in the Indonesian military and political establishment, especially among the nationalists who opposed East Timor's independence.
The question is whether Jakarta's troubled history with East Timor will be a new source of friction in South-east Asia. Much depends on how it deals with the East Timorese leaders, who remain deeply suspicious of the Indonesian military.
Mr Gusmao seeks reconciliation but his proposal to grant amnesty to pro-Indonesia militiamen pits him against his former comrades in Fretilin, the dominant party in the new East Timor Parliament.
It is likely that UN peacekeepers will be stationed in East Timor to keep the pro-Indonesia militiamen at bay after UN administrators relinquish control of the territory next month. UN administrative help is also needed for the next few years because the East Timorese have neither the machinery nor experience of government.
All told, East Timor needs a lot of help and faces an uncertain future. To find its niche in South-east Asia as an independent political entity, it has, above all, to make peace with Indonesia. If not, estrangement from its giant neighbour can only spell more trouble.