By Craig Cormick
"Gusmao's bullets are always his thoughts." — Agio Pereira, East Timor Relief Association
One year ago, on May 21, the East Timorese resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao, was found guilty of plotting against the Indonesian state and illegal possession of firearms, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The sentence was later reduced to 20 years.
A poet and journalist as well as a guerilla, Xanana has continued fighting for the freedom of his people from behind bars. His only weapons now are his thoughts and a pen.
In his most recent message, sent from his cell in Cipinang prison in Jakarta, in mid-April, he described the difficulties of his situation, where his activities were bringing threats from guards and some prisoners.
He wrote, "I ask humanitarian organisations for their protection by helping to get me transferred to another block. From morning until late at night, I have to put up with provocations and insults, both personal and political."
In another message, sent in November, he described life in prison, with restrictions on his movements, and sleep deprivation tactics employed by his guards.
He wrote, "There are thirteen cells, each with space for two people. Two people, two prisoners. I am here, mixed in with murderers, thieves and the insane. Timorese companions are in another cell, another block. Leaving this block is not allowed, and so we never meet."
But he added, "This is prison life. Only the body is imprisoned. The mind, the spirit are still free."
Xanana Gusmao has spent the last 19 years fighting for freedom. Although constantly on the move, continually sought after by Indonesian soldiers, to the people of East Timor, he was free — he lived beyond the regular repression: the night-time interrogations, the abductions, the torture and abuse, the threat of rape or murder.
To the small nation, he embodied resistance and freedom. In a subsequent tape-recorded message, smuggled out of prison in December 1993, Xanana said, "As long as there is still one guerilla fighter, the weapon of liberation will continue to spew forth the fire of freedom".
He also said, "We resist in order to win".
Capture
The armed resistance began immediately after the December 7, 1975, invasion, when large numbers of people fled into the mountains to avoid the invading Indonesian troops. They were able to regroup and plan and launch their own military strategies. Xanana emerged as leader of the resistance in the late 1970s, following major Indonesian military campaigns that nearly eliminated the rebels.
Operating from the remote and inaccessible mountains of the interior, Xanana survived six further campaigns to eradicate the armed resistance.
However, he was captured, in November 1992, in a house in Dili. The Indonesians brought him quickly to trial, which was to last four months. World interest first turned sharply towards the small nation, and then passed on again.
At his trial, Xanana attempted to read a 29-page defence statement, but was halted by the judge after reading only three pages.
At the time, the executive director of Asia Watch, Sidney Jones, said, "This is the first Indonesian political trial in memory where the defence statement has been censored by the judges. It was clear the Indonesian government felt it had something to lose by Xanana speaking freely."
The Australian Section of the International Commission of Jurists said the decision to halt his voice appeared to violate both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Indonesia's own criminal code.
Copies of the handwritten document were later distributed, so his words could be read. In the statement, he had said, "I reject the competence of any Indonesian court to try me, and particularly the jurisdiction of this court which has been imposed by force of arms and crimes against my homeland, East Timor ...
"The ones who should be standing before an international court are, in the first place,
"
- the Indonesian government for crimes committed in the past 17 years in East Timor;
"
- the US administration which gave the green light to the invasion of 7 December 1975 and have since given military aid and political support for Indonesia's genocide in East Timor;
"
- the governments of Australia and Western Europe for their policy of complicity towards Indonesia;
"
- and finally, the Portuguese government for its grave irresponsibility in the decolonisation of East Timor."
He also wrote of the power of words reaching him in his cell: "In Polwill [prison] where they try to flatter me with exaggerated attention, the inscriptions written by the prisoners, my companions, on the prison walls, remind me constantly of the sufferings of many of my compatriots, victims of all kinds of torture and also remind me constantly of the unforgettable 12 November 1991 [Dili cemetery massacre]. What did the peaceful demonstration of 12 November want? To remind Jakarta and to remind the world of the need for dialogue, to remind Jakarta and remind the world that there is something profoundly wrong in East Timor."
He finished his statement: "As a political prisoner in the hands of the occupiers of my country, it is of no consequence at all to me if they pass a death sentence here today. They have killed more than one third of the defenceless population of East Timor. They are killing my people and I am not worth more than the heroic struggle of my people who, because they are a small and weak people, have always been subjected to foreign rule."
'To resist'
Although tens of thousands of Indonesian soldiers have been involved in the 19-year campaign to eradicate the East Timorese rebels, the resistance's military strength has never been great. In September 1990, when Australian lawyer and journalist Robert Domm travelled into the mountains of East Timor to meet the rebels, Xanana said, "Militarily, we are very realistic, we don't dream of great military offensives. Our strategy is conditioned by the occupier's strategy, that's why our motto is: 'to resist is to win' — and not, 'to annihilate is to win'."
Domm said of Xanana, "He doesn't seem to belong in the mountains; he's not the type of person you'd expect to spend 15 years there ... What struck me was the combination of the intellectual and the soldier. He is a poet, peace negotiator, journalist, political theorist as well as a guerilla leader."
As a political prisoner, Xanana Gusmao still symbolises the struggle for freedom in East Timor, much as Nelson Mandela became the personalisation of the struggle by black South Africans for freedom.
Xanana was born in 1946 and baptised Jose Alexandre Gusmao. He studied at the Jesuit seminary at Dare, in the mountains overlooking Dili, and completed three years of compulsory military service under the Portuguese colonial administration.
In 1974, unhappy with conditions under the Portuguese colonial administration, he travelled to Darwin, where he worked as a labourer and began exploring the possibility of migrating to Australia with his family. However, upon his return to East Timor later that year, he was caught up in the decolonisation of his country, and ensuing civil unrest.
With training as a scholar and a soldier, he joined Fretilin — the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor — in 1974, as an information officer.
During the short but bitter civil war between Fretilin and the more pro-Indonesia Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), Xanana wrote poems and articles for the movement, and was a close friend of the poet Francisco Borja da Costa. He had asked Borja da Costa to bring his wife and children out of Dili if there was fighting there, but when Indonesian troops invaded, Borja was among those killed.
Xanana's wife Emilia and children Eugenio and Zenilda endured many years of victimisation, but were ultimately allowed to leave East Timor, and now live in Australia.
In 1978 Xanana became leader of the armed resistance, and in 1981 he was elected president of Fretilin.
Under his leadership, the armed resistance began to gain political credibility, so much so that in early 1983, the then military commander in Dili, Colonel Purwanto, signed a cease-fire with a condition that the United Nations would be involved in finding a solution. The cease-fire lasted five months, when the new Indonesian military commander, General Benny Murdani, declared all forces at his disposal would be used to defeat the guerrillas.
It took nine more years for them to capture Xanana Gusmao. Through it all, he retained a sense of perspective.
In a 1992 video interview done by Portuguese journalist Rui Araujo, he answered the question, "Who is Xanana?": "He is not the myth which some people have helped construct, nor even less the legendary figure on the lips of others. He is a man confronting many, many difficulties. A man who fights down a struggle within himself. A man with many defeats, but who, at the cost of the blood of his companions, has been forced to learn from his own mistakes."
Dialogue
In late 1992, shortly before he was captured, Xanana sent a message to the member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, saying, "Only dialogue can lessen the sufferings of the people of the third world. Dialogue [is] the political tool which has already led El Salvador, Mozambique and Angola into a new historical and political process, and ... will, we feel certain, permit economic development which satisfies the primary needs of the population."
Could the power of dialogue — of giving a voice to the people — prove a stronger threat to the Indonesian government than the power of a gun?
In his defence plea, Xanana said, "Who is afraid of a referendum? Why are they afraid of the referendum? I am not afraid of a referendum. And if today, under international supervision, the Maubere [East Timorese people] were to choose integration, I would make a genuine appeal to my companions in the bush to lay down their arms and I would offer my head to be decapitated in public.
"Whoever is afraid of a referendum is afraid of the truth."
[Poems translated from Portuguese by Agio Agio Pereira and Peter Wesley-Smith.]