Sha Na Na for president of East Timor

If you're hunkered over your Cheerios expecting a good laugh -- or even a modest chuckle -- from this column, I have to tell you straight-away that today's scribbling isn't very funny.

I saw a headline this week that said voters in East Timor had elected a poet as their first president.

Poetry isn't my strong suit. But I have a sense that the world could use more poets and novelists and playwrights and artists in charge of things.

I remember when Vaclav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. I was fascinated by the fact that he was a playwright and poet.

And I remember that day in October 1978 when the wire services were reporting, right at deadline, that a new pope had been elected. I waited for the name. Finally it came:

Karol Wojtyla.

No, no, I said during an urgent phone call to the wire-service editors. There's some mistake. That doesn't look Italian.

And it wasn't. It was the name of a former actor and ardent supporter of the underground theater in Poland.

But back to East Timor.

(Have you looked at a map yet? Good luck.)

East Timor occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor, one of the 13,000 islands of Indonesia. In 1975 the Indonesian army overran East Timor, and a struggle for independence has been fought ever since.

With this week's election, autonomy has been achieved. East Timor will become the world's newest independent country on May 20.

And its poet-president is Jose Alexandre Gusmao, who goes by the nickname Xanana, which is pronounced like this: Sha Na Na -- which you may recognize as the name of an American rock 'n' roll group. That's exactly what Gusmao had in mind.

Already you can tell that having a poet as president is more fun.

When Indonesia took over the country in 1975, Gusmao fled to the mountains as part of a pro-independence guerrilla group. Gusmao took command of the guerrillas in 1981. He was captured in 1992 but continued his independence campaign from his jail cell in Jakarta. Some seven years and 200,000 war-related deaths later, Gusmao was released from jail after Indonesia's dictator, Suharto, died. The United Nations took over the administration of East Timor and called for democratic elections.

Since Sept. 11, journalism organizations have been saying American news outlets need a better understanding of world affairs. Several seminars have been held on this topic in recent months.

When I saw the East Timor headline, I realized I had a lot to learn. But I was glad I had an opportunity to find out more about Xanana Gusmao, a poet who was willing to die for freedom and wound up being president.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.