Audrey Young – At midnight on Sunday in East Timor, a greying former fighter with the rhythmic name of the newest sovereign nation of the century, East Timor.

In the shadows, sharing his emotional moment, will be his younger Australian wife, 36-year-old Kirsty Sword, pregnant with their second child.

Their union in some respects is a fairytale ending to what has been a deadly journey to independence. More than 200,000 are estimated to have been killed in the strife since Indonesia invaded the Catholic territory in 1975. Back then, it was largely seen as just another worthy cause of the rowdy left and do-gooder church groups.

But by the Apec Auckland conference in 1999, the tiny country had captured the conscience and hearts of the world as murdering militia let rip after the overwhelming independence vote run by the United Nations.

Xanana (the X is pronounced as a soft J) Gusmao was not a widely known figure outside East Timor until 1992. That was when he was captured in Dili as the leader of the guerilla army Falintil that he had led for five years.

His legendary status soon emerged to the outside world: a poet, artist, thinker and military strategist whose charisma, according to New Zealand friend Dr Andrew Ladley, still causes people to melt into tears when they meet him.

Another friend, Corrections Minister Matt Robson, recalls meeting elderly women in the mountain villages of East Timor on independence referendum day and saying his name over and over, like an incantation, stroking his jacket with a picture of him while they did so.

Gusmao, now aged 55, and Sword met and fell in love while he was imprisoned in Jakarta.

She had been a fresh-faced former ballet student from Melbourne whose studies of Indonesian language took her to East Timor in 1991 as an interpreter and researcher for a Yorkshire Television documentary.

She had been in East Timor shortly before the bloody Santa Cruz cemetery massacre which claimed more than 200 victims. News coverage of the massacre by Indonesian soldiers, secretly captured on film, and a new documentary by campaigning journalist John Pilger thrust the sleeping issue of East Timor back into the light where it remained through the 90s.

The killings particularly shocked Kirsty Sword as she had just been there. It jolted her into action.

She went to Jakarta ostensibly to teach English but became an undercover runner of information and communications equipment in Jakarta for the East Timor resistance movement.

Speaking on the ABC's documentary series Australian Story screened last February, Nobel peace laureate and East Timor's Foreign Minister in waiting, Jose Ramos Horta, described Sword as "a fantastic undercover agent".

"She did what was a dangerous job, smuggling information to Xanana in Cipinang in prison, smuggling out information, passing on information to me, passing on money to Xanana or money to the students ... She was indispensable, reliable, discreet, humble. That woman is perfect ... she would have been murdered if she had been caught."

He had trusted her to raise the plan of a commando raid to spring Gusmao – a plan vetoed by the prisoner himself.

Clandestine operators gave themselves codenames. Sword's was "Ruby Blade" – Blade for Sword and Ruby because "it sounded kind of Agatha Christie".

Pat Walsh of the East Timor Reconciliation Commission knew her well. "She sort of had a Mona Lisa deceptive thing about her," he told the ABC.

"She looked completely innocent, but she was the sort of person who could do that in her own time and then go for a swim in the pool at the Australian Embassy on the weekend. They had no inkling that she was a priceless repository of intelligence that any government would give their eye-tooth for, because she was working on the issue that was of most concern to Australia."

Sword taught Gusmao English by letter. Then she gave him a cellphone. "My hunch is that it's the mobile phone that actually led to the blossoming romance," said Walsh.

Sword worked in Jakarta for four years. After Gusmao was moved from prison to house arrest she became his assistant until his release in October 1999, shortly after the August 30 referendum for independence.

Gusmao divorced his first wife, Emilia Baptista, who had lived in Melbourne since 1990 with their two children, Nito and Zeni.

He married Kirsty Sword in July 2000, and their first baby boy, Alexandre, was born in late August.

Three days after marrying, the pair travelled to New Zealand on an official visit. The closest they got to a honeymoon, apparently, was a relaxing dip in hot pools at Rotorua.

Gusmao used the visit to renew friendships with New Zealanders who had kept the faith when most of the world had forgotten East timor.

Among them was associate foreign minister Matt Robson who, like Foreign Minister Phil Goff, became independence activists after Indonesia's invasion.

Robson had met Gusmao earlier but recalls with a smile meeting Sword for the first time when she was working for Gusmao under house arrest. He had no inkling of romance.

But back in New Zealand, showing two women colleagues a photograph of the trio, they instantly picked a sparkle in their eyes and what it meant.

But his first meeting with Gusmao, in Cipinang prison in 1997, was the more memorable for Robson. "I would say it is probably the most moving experience I've had in terms of meeting a leader."

He realised that Gusmao's stature had endured in prison when the prison governor offered up his grand office for the pair to meet in private and would respectfully check every so often to see that Gusmao was okay.

Gusmao had no airs and graces. "That's his character. He took my hand and held it and he said, 'I am very humbled that you have come to see me'. "I said to him, 'you're humbled that I've come to see you?"'

Robson describes Gusmao as "truly great". "He doesn't have to prove his selflessness. He doesn't have to prove his devotion to his people. He doesn't have to prove that he puts his country above himself. And he didn't need a PR machine to manufacture that."

Robson saw the invasion of East Timor after the Portuguese colonialists left as manifestation of American foreign policy which "was to allow friendly regimes to either suppress their own labour movements and people's movements and/or take other territory".

"It's a dreadful and shameful period of history. It was really the United States and Britain, the big two, saying to Indonesia, 'We will give you the green light'."

Robson acknowledged the role of people like Auckland activist Maire Leadbetter in trying to keep the East Timor issue alive.

But he said the 1984-1990 Labour Government "went soft". New Zealand went out of its way in the 1980s and 1990s to keep East Timor off the international agenda. "They wanted a better relationship with Indonesia so they just turned a blind eye to it."

Robson left Labour in 1988 and is now associate foreign affairs minister, responsible for aid in countries like East Timor.

Goff was an active member of the Committee for an Independent East Timor. "It seemed not only an horrendous injustice, but it seemed that Western countries were bereft of any principle in terms of criticising the Indonesian actions and standing up for the rights of a small nation," he said.

As the chairman of Labour Youth, he took the issue to party conferences and got resolutions passed supporting the East Timorese.

In Opposition in the 1990s, Goff became active again after the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre – in which New Zealander Kamal Bamadajh was killed – and promoted a majority parliamentary petition. By 1996 attitudes were changing in Government echelons. The National Government had dropped its position that the Indonesian control of East Timor was "irreversible".

Both Goff and Robson went to East Timor as United Nations' observers for the August 1999 referendum along with Act's Ken Shirley, independent Rana Waitai and National's Roger Maxwell.

Shirley describes voting day as "one of the most stunning, moving days of my life".

The MPs had taken eight hours the day before to drive 100km on rough mountainous roads to a place called Ainaro. There they were told local militia had just acquired a truck of M16 automatic guns and planned to make an example of them.

Shirley spent a nervous night in a rundown abandoned hotel, rooming with Robson, who had smashed an empty beer bottle to keep by his bedside as a weapon.

They were up at 5am and were greeted with a stunning sight. "There was just a seething mass of humanity, said Shirley. "You'd look up the mountains and every mountain track was just full of streams of people.

"It was like a flock of sheep coming off the high country. They were all dressed up in their best clothes. The men wore Portuguese hats.

"The old folks and young kids were sitting on donkeys, just an endless stream as far as the eye could see in every direction. They were determined to come out and vote."

The violence in the days after the vote sickened Shirley. "I felt that we let them down. They were promised they were going to be safe by the United Nations. But there was no way they could be safe."

Goff said: "We talked [before the vote] to one of the Indonesians heading up an unlikely group called the reconciliation and friendship groups, and I remember his words.

"He said, 'If these ungrateful people decide to vote for independence, we will take everything we can carry, and what we cannot carry we will destroy'.

"We thought 'what an arsehole'. But he was probably the only Indonesian who told us the truth because that's precisely what happened."

A quarter of the estimated 850,000 population fled across the border to Indonesian-controlled West Timor and 50,000 are still there. Gusmao, who was visited by Nelson Mandela in prison, has espoused the South African's philosophy of forgiveness and reconciliation. Some want to concentrate on the now, not the past.

The problems ahead for East Timor are daunting, everyone acknowledges. The United Nations by most accounts has acquitted itself well in guiding the territory from ruin to the edge of statehood. The East Timorese are grateful, but not grovellingly so.

Gusmao tried to explain his thinking in a "honeymoon" speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. After thanking New Zealand for its role in independence, he said in his heavy Portuguese accent:

"The people of East Timor are determined to take an active part in this process instead of mere bystanders and recipients of international solidarity and assistance.

"The August 30, 1999 final act of self-determination in East Timor was a magnificent display of democratic consciousness.

"It was a long and difficult struggle for independence and democracy with dreams the people knew could only be realised through independence: to freely live and express our identity and culture, to be active participants in the process of our development as a nation and as human beings, to guarantee our rights as citizens and our collective rights as a society."