Word: timorously
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...