The Cult Of Gusmao

By Terry McCarthy/Dili

The woman in black is waiting for him. Xanana Gusmao, East Timor's poet-revolutionary and de facto leader, is working his way through a crowd of admirers. When he reaches her, she throws her arms around him and sobs uncontrollably on his shoulder. Her husband and brother were killed by the Indonesian-backed militia last September--what should she do with her five children? Gusmao holds her for a very long time, all the while talking in a low, soothing voice. Then he reaches up and gently wipes tears from the woman's face, kisses her on both cheeks and moves on. The mass of people around him have backed off and gone silent.

Gusmao's life is full of such powerful moments these days. Minutes later the crowd has raised him on their shoulders, and Gusmao is pumping his followers up again with his trademark rallying cry: "Viiiiva East Timorrrr! Viiiiva independencia!"

They have no food in this village of Padiai in the Oecussi district, 110 miles west of Dili, the capital. Most of their homes are still charred remnants of the militia's rampage six months ago. Virtually everybody has a tale of torture, rape or murder. But Gusmao has come to them as savior and healer. After 500 years of Portuguese colonization and 24 more of Indonesian occupation, the people of East Timor now revel in one man's promise of freedom from fear.

When East Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia last Aug. 30, many outsiders sensed a political and economic disaster. What good could come to 850,000 people living on half an island a thousand miles from nowhere? Sure enough, after the vote, the rebuffed Indonesian troops killed, burned and looted all they could on their way home. A graffito they left on the walls of Dili promised that A FREE EAST TIMOR WILL EAT STONES. Some 1,000 East Timorese died, and more than three-quarters of the population fled their homes, according to U.N. estimates. East Timor joined the world's list of nations at the very bottom: the World Bank estimated per capita GDP at $240, on a par with nations like Mozambique and Ethiopia.

But something remarkable is happening on this half an island. Gusmao, 53, a former guerrilla leader and political prisoner, has tapped into reserves that are out of reach of the World Bank and the IMF, reserves of willpower and pride the people themselves barely knew existed. Exuding the authority of Nelson Mandela and the charisma of Che Guevara, Gusmao has been traveling the country spreading his vision of the future. "All of us must let go of the bad things they have done to us," he said in his first speech after returning to Timor in October, "because the future is ours." Timorese may be hungry, but for the first time they are learning to stand on their own feet. "The man is shaping the nation," says Father Filomeno Jacob, a Jesuit priest in Dili who worked secretly with the resistance beginning in the 1980s. "He believes he is the embodiment of people's hopes."

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.

By the time Gusmao was finally released last October, he arrived home to the ruined buildings and shattered lives of the postindependence carnage. In his first speech in Dili, he had tears in his eyes as he told the crowd, "We knew we would suffer--but we are still here."

Gusmao now works in uneasy alliance with the U.N., which has been criticized by many Timorese for being hopelessly slow in delivering economic aid. There are many basic issues to settle in framing East Timor's independence, from which currency to use--it will be the U.S. dollar--to what the official language should be (English or Portuguese). Yet despite his overwhelming popularity, Gusmao says he does not want to be the nation's first President in the elections scheduled for mid-2001: "Our struggle was not for us, but for the young people. [A President] needs more capacity than I have." Most of his countrymen think Gusmao has plenty, and as they build a new country, they feel they need him more than ever.

--With reporting by Jason Tedjasukmana/Dili

With reporting by Jason Tedjasukmana/Dili