Lindsay Murdoch, Dili – Former guerilla fighter Mr Xanana Gusmao will become the first president of independent East Timor. After insisting for months that he would refuse the job, Mr Gusmao now says he plans to accept nomination for the presidency at United Nations-supervised elections scheduled for late next year.

Almost all of the emerging Timorese political parties and their leaders have pledged their support for Mr Gusmao leading the half-island territory to its independence. A small breakaway faction of Fretilin, the party Mr Gusmao once led, opposes his election.

Nobel peace prize winner, Mr Jose Ramos-Horta, told the Herald that two weeks ago he confronted Mr Gusmao about his unwillingness to accept the position. "I told him 'stop this bulls – -... you know you enjoy it. Don't tell me you don't'," Mr Ramos-Horta said. When he asked Mr Gusmao whether he could turn his back on his people, he replied no. "Xanana has agreed to accept the job," Mr Ramos-Horta said.

Mr Gusmao spent eight years in Indonesian jails after his capture in Dili in 1992. He was released late last year after a majority of East Timorese voted to reject Indonesia's 24-year rule of the former Portuguese territory.

Timorese leaders have agreed that Mr Gusmao should lead a government of national unity, made up of representatives of all significant parties, for at least five years after the withdrawal of UN administrators. The UN has been running the territory since the withdrawal of Indonesia's armed forces and officials last September.

Mr Gusmao recently married a Melbourne woman, Ms Kirsty Sword, a longtime worker behind the scenes for the East Timorese resistance in Jakarta.

Despite the Indonesian military's sponsorship of violence in the territory last year Mr Gusmao has developed a warm relationship with Indonesia's president, Mr Abdurrahman Wahid.

Mr Ramos-Horta is set to become East Timor's first foreign minister although he insists he would prefer not to have the job. "You cannot retain your integrity once you are in the government," he said. "But if I honestly believe that there is no-one else who can do the job I would do it in a transition period."

All of East Timor's major political parties support Mr Ramos-Horta becoming foreign minister. He returned to a hero's welcome in the territory late last year after 24 years as the resistance movement's international representative.