Xanana Gusmão, charismatic prime minister of East Timor

Reasons to love Xanana Gusmão:

As a teenage soccer goalie, he "was too busy making up sonnets to actually stop any goals" (as I found out from reading The Crossing)

The obvious: he was a total badass freedom fighter. Forced to drop out of school at age fifteen due to lack of money, he become active advocating East Timor's independence from Portugal, then led the resistance against Indonesia after the latter invaded East Timor. He was captured in 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment, but was...