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The romantic cult of Gusmao is not without its detractors. The air around him is musky with the appeal of the poet-warrior, and some of Gusmao's fellow leaders in the National Council for Timorese Resistance, or CNRT, the umbrella group that campaigned for independence last year, are envious of the attention he receives. Others criticize his personalized, overly emotional approach to politics. "If people saw the way he handles meetings," says Jose Ramos-Horta, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize with Bishop Carlos Belo and represented the East Timorese cause overseas for 24 years. The more populist Gusmao has eclipsed their roles. "He screams and shouts and pounds his fist on the table--but then he smiles and jokes. He can do it because of his authority."
That authority is spreading. When Indonesia's new reformist President, Abdurrahman Wahid, visited last month, an angry crowd gathered to protest the disappearance of their relatives during the occupation. Gusmao immediately jumped off the podium and plunged into the crowd, arguing, calming and pleading until, single-handedly, he had pacified several hundred people. Then he led three of the protesters through the throng to meet Wahid. "It was amazing," says Peter Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, now working for the U.N. in East Timor. "There was this woman politely asking Wahid to know where her husband was buried, and he replied that he would do what he could, and Xanana sat beside them smiling."
Gusmao is not a trained economist or public administrator, but he is steeped in the lessons of suffering. Born in 1946 in a sleepy town 30 miles east of Dili, he wrote in his autobiography that he grew up to the groans of prisoners being whipped in public by heavy-handed Portuguese colonialists. At 16 he ran away from his studies at a Catholic seminary and wound up in Dili, teaching Portuguese at a Chinese school and working as a government surveyor. He was fired when, in his first act of defiance, he threatened to punch his boss in an argument over racial discrimination by East Timor's Portuguese overlords.
In 1974 Gusmao began a career as a journalist and watched with satisfaction as the Portuguese finally retreated from East Timor. But peace was short lived; the following year Indonesian President Suharto ordered his troops to invade. Gusmao joined the resistance, fleeing into the mists of the heavily forested mountains that run the length of the island. By 1981 he was leader of the resistance--and for Indonesia's special forces, the most wanted man in the country. Gusmao eluded capture until 1992. But on a secret trip to Dili, a contact betrayed him, and the rebel leader was arrested.
Like so many charismatic revolutionaries, Gusmao used his imprisonment as a platform. At his trial in Dili, he called for a vote on East Timor's future: "Whoever is afraid of the referendum is afraid of the truth." He quickly became one of the world's most prominent political prisoners, writing poetry and letters to keep the dream of independence alive. In 1997 Mandela visited and called for his release. A year later, Suharto's successor, B.J. Habibie, surprised everyone--particularly his own military--by taking up Gusmao's challenge of a referendum on full independence for East Timor. And when Indonesia lost the vote, the generals unleashed their armed militias on the Timorese people for two weeks of blind terror.