| Subject: The Age: Hail
The Poet Warrior [portrait of Xanana Gusmao] The Age [Melbourne] Saturday 30 October 1999
Hail the poet warrior
By GARY TIPPET
High on the mountain peaks of Timor
The grass grows
And warms the fractured bones
Of a fighter who fell.
Down on the grassy plains of Timor
A flower shows
And beautifies the bones
Of a fighter who fell.
Xanana Gusmao
THE POET warrior: in the mythology of resistance it is an
alluring, enduring image. In truth it fits few. This one, though, seems true.
His camouflage uniform may be crisp and new, his nom de
guerre stitched neatly over his right breast, the name of his remnant army, Falintil, on
his left shoulder, but his reality is written in his face. He is coffee-brown,
high-cheekboned and handsome. His wavy hair has been greyed by a quarter-century of battle
and flight, hunger and hiding, jungle and jail. His eyes are dark, infinitely deep and
inexpressibly sad.
He stands on the steps of a ruined Government House and, at
last, talks to his people. Shouting, his usually soft voice husky with hurt: Viva Timor
Loro'sae! Viva o Povo Maubere! - Long live East Timor! Long live the Maubere people! He
talks of sacrifice and victory, rebuilding and, here among the wreckage, even of
forgiving. "Today we finally find our liberation," he tells them. "Mothers
and fathers, sisters and brothers, be happy."
Someone fails and gives a single, wrenching sob. It runs
like a tremor through the crowd until all are in tears. And now Xanana weeps, too.
"I tell you this," says Jose Ramos Horta, his
elegant comrade, who fought his lonely war of resistance living out of an overnight bag
and tramping the world of diplomacy, "and I tell you frankly: this is the most
extraordinary human being I have met in my life and I have met many, many great
people."
HE WAS born Jose Alexandre Gusmao in the beautiful
north-coast town of Manatuto. It was either the night of the 20th or the early morning of
21 June 1946. Either way, he recalls in his soon-to-be-published autobiography To Resist
Is To Win, it was "in the scorching heat that ripens the rice".
His earliest memories are of seaside afternoons, "an
earthen bowl of steaming chicken soup, with locust from the plains at harvest time, or
with balchao, seafood preserves whose aroma of algae would waft even into a child's
dreams, amid stories of crocodiles and shrieks of fright at the sticky touch of a dead
octopus".
His father, Manuel, was a schoolteacher, the only son of a
poor peasant family, but nevertheless an "assimilated Timorese" eager to sever
the links between his children and "a barefoot culture". But already the rebel
Xanana was being formed. As a boy he was repelled by the sight of shanghaied gangs of
laborers and prisoners being whipped.
After four years of primary school, Gusmao was sent to the
Our Lady of Fatima Jesuit seminary in Dare, in the hills above Dili. Popular, but less
than diligent, and unhappy, he ran away at 16. For the next three years he worked in Dili
and Manatuto, as a typographical designer, Portugese tutor, unpaid typist and fisherman
while completing secondary school at nights. He grew bitter watching public service
opportunities bypass him for "the children of bigwigs" and those who had thrown
in their lot with the colonialists.
"Disenchanted, I took to gathering with like-minded
friends, swelling the number of thinkers among the tintanas, those who spent their nights
drinking red wine, and the frustrated," he wrote.
Ramos Horta remembers him dimly but differently from those
days: "He was always a serious person, maybe too serious at times," he says,
laughing.
"Whereas, in school I would run off to go swimming, or
join with others in drinking ourselves to death in a pub, he never cut school, he never
got drunk. While we would chase women he would behave like a priest."
In 1968 Gusmao began his army national service and the
following year married Emilia Baptista. Back in the public service he became aware of a
"chatting and grumbling" clandestine anti-colonial group, formed by a young
urban elite including Ramos Horta. This was the beginning of Frente Revolucionara do Timor
Leste Independente, or Fretilin.
In 1974, after a left-wing coup, Portugal began to
decolonise East Timor. After living and working in Darwin for five months, Gusmao returned
home in November. In May 1975, in spite of his elders' tears, he finally decided: "If
I wanted to fight for my homeland, there was only one way to do so: to join
Fretilin".
Fretilin had formed a short-lived coalition with the other
pro-independence group UDT, but in August, after Fretilin won 55per cent of the vote in
local elections, the UDT launched a full-scale coup. Savage fighting raged through Dili
and Gusmao was briefly imprisoned. Fretilin's armed wing, Falintil, prevailed in the
three-week civil war and took control of the territory. On 28November, Gusmao, now a
journalist, filmed the low-key, almost fearful ceremony as Fretilin declared independence
in the palace at Dili.
"If there was any joy, it was hidden in our
hearts," he later wrote. "It was a treasure that was hard to share. On people's
faces, fear, reflecting the seriousness of the situation, and nobody asked about the
future."
It was just nine days in coming. On 7 November the
Indonesians, who had been launching border incursions for months, invaded. Gusmao
remembers being woken by the incessant rumbling of aircraft flying overhead. "What we
witnessed throughout those days was pillage," he wrote. "Bombardment weapons
vomited flames over Dili's hillsides, while cargo ships emptied the custom house of its
contents."
As many as 2000 people were killed in Dili in those first
days. Tens of thousands fled. "I saw no fear in their exhaustion. I saw resignation
in their eyes and anguish that must have been torturing their souls ... but they smiled,
as if that might somehow relieve their suffering."
Gusmao, like 20,000 Fretilin troops, retreated to the
mountains. Emilia, their son, Nito, and baby daughter Zeni, were trapped in Dili. He would
not see them for almost 20 years.
IT CAN BE said that he was reborn Key Rala Xanana Gusmao -
the first two words in honor of his grandfather, the third, rooted in the middle syllable
of his middle name, Alexandre - on Timor's "mountain of death", Matebian, at the
end of 1978.
For the previous three years the Indonesians, with their
US-supplied Bronco aircraft and napalm, had battered Falintil and the thousands of
starving civilians it was protecting. Perhaps 100,000 people had already died and the
resistance army was reduced to a few hundred guerrillas.
In December Falintil commander Nicolo Lobato was killed by
Indonesian commandos and Fretilin's remnant leaders were hopelessly corralled on Matebian.
Gusmao decided to take a handful of fatalukus, the most disciplined men, and try to break
through the Indonesian cordon and reorganise.
For about two years the outside world heard nothing of
them. But this, many observers believe, was the making of the warrior statesman the world
now knows as Xanana. It was the beginning of his Long March.
"I think it was in that two-year period that he was
transformed through crisis into a leader," says Sarah Niner, his Melbourne-based
biographer and editor of To Resist Is To Win. "Until then he'd been a fairly junior
military leader in the east, he certainly hadn't been part of the main leadership
structure. But I get this impression of him being the last bomb there on Matebian ... he
just looked around and thought `I'm the last one left'. That was the blackest period, they
were the dark years. He says he cried every day."
Through 1979 and 1980 Xanana and the men who became known
as the 50 fugitives from the east walked from village to village, dodging enemy
strongholds, surviving on tubers, banana tree stalks and aibubur, a kind of eucalyptus,
asking people whether to continue the struggle. The answer was emphatic: "The old
people embraced me, weeping, and cried: `Son, carry on the fight! Never surrender. You are
our only hope!"'
Niner says it was this knowledge of his people, and the 14
years in the mountains, that made Gusmao so confident this year's independence ballot
would be overwhelmingly carried: "I think he was soaking up the pain of the people he
came across. That's what I think is so interesting about him, this ability to take on
their pain and in some way to tap into a sort of national consciousness."
Xanana set about rebuilding the resistance. He set up the
clandestine support base and transformed Falintil into independent, mobile units.
Critically, taking advantage of a six-month ceasefire, he began transforming Fretilin from
a leftist group into a truly inclusive, nationalist movement through a policy of
"national unity". Even the old enemies of the UDT were embraced.
This was Gusmao's great achievement, says Scott Burchill, a
lecturer in international relations at Deakin University. His charisma was matched by
discipline and organisational skills. "Simply by the presence of his personality he's
been able to unite the resistance behind him into one structure and one leadership."
Adds Ramos Horta: "200,000 people had died and the
country had been thoroughly destroyed. This is the country, this is the movement he
inherited and he turned it into an incredible political force."
SUCH WAS the stature of Xanana that even after his betrayal
and capture in Dili in November 1992, he was soon returned to the leadership.The
independence struggle was renewed from his prison cell.
Imprisonment worked to his advantage. He became a focal
point for the resistance and more accessible to the UN, foreign governments and human
rights organisations. The world began to learn his name.
On his first visit to Jakarta in 1997, Nelson Mandela asked
President Suharto for a meeting with his captive. Gusmao was not told until the last
minute. He was told to get dressed and driven through the streets of Jakarta to the
presidential guest house where he sat down to dinner with the world's other famous
political prisoner.
Many have made the comparison with Mandela: both were
freedom fighters, though Gusmao was far more intimately and dangerously involved in the
armed struggle; both suffered the torment and isolation of prison. But mostly because both
personify the power of forgiveness.
"Like Mandela he has no deep rancor in him about the
Indonesians," says long-time Timor observer, Catholic Bishop Hilton Deakin. "He
has every reason to hate them and all the destruction they've perpetrated on his people
for 24 years and on the country. But he doesn't. I think he'd feel absolutely wretched
about them, but he will not articulate any concept of revenge."
And like Mandela, Gusmao's sacrifice has cost him his
family. After years of harassment in Dili, Emilia and the children fled to Melbourne in
1990. Nito, a student, says he and his sister have never really known their father. That
has hurt them deeply.
"Of course he is a father to me, I carry his blood
inside me, but I have also come to understand that he is also father to a lot of young
Timorese that lost their own parents during these 24 years. I'm sure the time is coming
for us to get to know him again."
This is the hopeful life that grows
>From life's release
The life that every woman knows
Who calls for peaceWith every waking breathBut not the
peace of death
Throughout the peaks and plains of Timor
The life-blood flows
And animates the bones
Of the fighters who fell.
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