Phil Zabriskie – Who is Xanana Gusmao? A Portuguese journalist put that question to Gusmao himself shortly before he was captured by the Indonesian military in November 1992. The answer, a celebrated freedom fighter battling a brutal oppressor, seemed plain to most everyone – except to the freedom fighter himself. "He is not the myth which some people have helped construct," was his reply. "He is a man confronting many difficulties. A man who fights down a struggle within himself."

Who is Xanana Gusmao, we ask 10 years on and just a few weeks before May 20, the day East Timor officially becomes the world's newest nation. Instead of jungle fatigues or a prisoner's uniform, he wears jeans and light flannel shirts. His face, wan and sagging during life on the run, is robust. Gusmao, 55, is no longer a soldier trying to defeat an occupying army, but a head of state trying to build a country. Yet still, now as before, he's struggling with himself. "If I win, I will be President," he said before the election. "But I don't want to be President."

Gusmao's courage, integrity and charisma make him a natural hero. For giving them liberty, his people worship him. But Gusmao does not shoulder his greatness easily. When he hears the word hero, he mentions many others – Nobel laureates Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Josi Ramos-Horta, and the guerrillas he fought alongside – but never himself. His humility camouflages a self-doubt that gnaws at him.

When Gusmao was fighting what seemed an invincible foe, he was haunted by whether he was achieving anything more than the continued misery of his people. "There were many moments of despair," he says. In the end, he and his followers prevailed, but at a cost that he still thinks too high – "the loss of my companions, some who died just to save me."

Today, his burden of office is the presidency itself, a post he vowed he would never assume because he felt personal ambition would betray a promise made to his guerrillas to stay out of any administration if they won independence. He agreed to run only when it became clear that not running would betray a broader commitment, both to those soldiers and to East Timor. The people were beseeching him to do a job for them, as they did in the late 1970s, when the rebels were low on morale, food, arms and manpower. "Go back to the jungle," he remembers the villagers pleading. "Fight and die there." They needed him to risk his life to sustain what little hope they had. He could not refuse. "This situation," he says, "pressuring me to be President, is the same. It is why, even though I don't want it, I accept it. I will try not to disappoint them."

So now that he has accepted it, can Gusmao make the leap from bush to bureaucracy? The challenges he faces are as daunting as once his armed stalkers were. He and other East Timorese leaders must forge an economy, build legal and education systems and reconstruct a civil service.

History is littered with revolutionaries who failed as national leaders, or at most had a mixed record: Castro, Mugabe, Sukarno, Mao. Gusmao is nowhere as self-obsessed, so he is not prey to the often destructive conviction that one man can save the nation. He understands that for East Timor to first survive, then flourish, he needs the international community and that he must deliver on the good governance it demands. Gusmao, says a UN official in Dili, "has a lot of Mandela in him."

Gusmao, in turn, will demand a great deal from his people. He knows he can't offer them the best life-he would settle for a better one. He hopes that the sacrifices he asks them to make-to forgo better housing, education and jobs-might be their last, just as being President will be his last. Then this most uncommon man can be, as he desires, "just a common citizen." For Xanana Gusmao, that may be the hardest struggle of all.