East Timor has been occupied by Indonesia for 17 years. On December 17 this year Portugal and Indonesia will be holding negotiations at UN headquarters in New York over East Timor.
Gusmao, 46, a poet, journalist, and graduate of the Catholic Seminary of Timor, was preparing for the negotiations before his arrest by Indonesian authorities on November 20.
Gusmao is a leading member of the National Council of Maubere Resistance (CNRM), an umbrella organisation of all pro-independence groups operating inside and outside Timor.
Gusmao said in an Inter-Press Service (IPS) interview that Indonesia emerged as the successor to the Dutch East Indies "and for this reason its governments never claimed this part of Timor, colonised by the Portuguese since 1511.
"It was never influenced by Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam, the religions prevailing in the other islands.
"The Mauberes are of Malayan, Polynesian and Melanesian origin, therefore closer to these peoples of the Pacific islands than to the Indonesians of Java and Bali," he noted.
Gusmao recalled that more than 200,000 Timorese, out of a population of 650,000 registered in 1975, died under the repression of the Indonesian invaders.
He highlighted to the seventeen years of resistance in the territory and the pacifist campaign being conducted in all areas, like that which Jose Ramos-Horta, CNRM spokesperson, has been carrying out at the international level.
He said that "a people cannot be asked to renounce their right to be free".
The UN general assembly has passed 10 resolutions in favour of the Mauberes rights, and one passed by the UN Security Council urging withdrawal of Indonesian forces.
According to Gusmao "economic interests held in Indonesia by nations like the United States, Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany and Canada," are an obstacle to East Timorese independence.
The United Nations "seems to have been transformed into a centre for stock market quotations", he said, and that "Timor is an uncomfortable affair" for the Vatican.
Gusmao vowed that despite repression "we will continue our struggle to find a solution to the problem of Timor." He said that "peace will only be possible with reconciliation, because a nation is great only if it is capable of granting pardon. "We are not fighting the Indonesian people. They are not our enemies, but rather the victims, like ourselves, of a repressive regime.
"It must not be forgotten that to seize power in 1965 Suharto perpetrated the slaughter of more than one million Indonesians."
[From IPS and Pegasus.]