Word: gusmao
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...