Xanana Gusmao

Xanana Gusmao led the East Timorese resistance for a decade in the mountains, spent seven years in an Indonesian prison, and became his country's first president. Indonesia invaded in 1975, days after Portugal abandoned the colony, and the occupation killed something between a hundred thousand and a hundred and eighty thousand people out of a population under a million - proportionally among the worst of the twentieth century. Gusmao took over Falintil, the armed wing, after most of its leadership was killed, and reorganised it around the argument that the war could not be won militarily and had to be won diplomatically, which meant broadening the movement beyond its Marxist origins. He was captured in 1992 and continued to direct the resistance from Cipinang prison in Jakarta, where he learned English and Indonesian, painted, and received visiting diplomats. The Santa Cruz massacre of 1991, filmed by a British journalist, had already changed international opinion. After Suharto fell, the 1999 referendum produced a seventy-eight per cent vote for independence and a campaign of destruction by militias that burned most of the country's buildings. He was elected president in 2002, later served as prime minister, and returned as prime minister again in 2023. The truth commission he supported documented the occupation in detail and he then argued against prosecutions, on the grounds that Timor-Leste had to live next to Indonesia; survivors' groups have never accepted that. He won a maritime boundary case against Australia at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2018, having led the negotiation himself. He is a poet and was writing in prison throughout.

• Lived: 1946 CE – ?
• Nationality: East Timorese
• Roles: head_of_state, military_leader