For 23 years East Timor's "foreign minister-in-exile" has fought the Indonesian occupation on a global battlefield. I was surprised to find Dr Jose Ramos Horta - Nobel Peace Prize winner, author, diplomat, activist and scholar - more confident than others in the Timorese resistance that the war with Indonesia is essentially won.
That is Horta the diplomat speaking. But Horta the activist stresses "a lot of dangers and risks" from an Indonesian military and militias apparently determined to spoil the August 8th referendum on autonomy or independence - by intimidating voters.
Horta the scholar is already thinking of a prosperous future for an independent East Timor "rich in natural resources". He wants to see a "compassion policy" of development for a transitional 10 years applied to a society traumatised by violence and corruption. "Otherwise we will have thousands of people demonstrating in the streets, saying why did we die", as 200,000 have at Indonesian hands.
The signing of an autonomy agreement between Indonesia and Portugal at the United Nations last week was "the culmination of a strategy that we worked on for several years to have the UN deployed in East Timor", Dr Horta said in an interview in Dublin.
And he takes some credit that the accord has since become the business of the UN Security Council, after "we outmanoeuvred the Indonesians". He was "pleasantly surprised" that the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, took his advice to put the historic agreement before the council, which duly endorsed it.
The accord provides for independence, if the voters reject autonomy within Indonesia. Dr Horta is sure that over 90 per cent will opt for independence.
The violence by army-backed militias has, he says, been part of an Indonesian attempt to undermine the resistance's strategy at the UN. By not responding to it in kind, "in fact it was the Indonesians who fell into our trap - not the other way . . . We got the international community on our side - and we now have the moral authority," he says of the long struggle which only came to fruition in recent months. He has high praise for the support of President Clinton's State Department.
Though only up to 300 lightly-armed UN police will be deployed, he hopes atrocities by anti-independence militias will be less likely given the presence of 600 observers and hundreds of NGOs and foreign politicians. He wants also to see solidarity activists going about in pairs, for their security.
The police will be there officially as "advisers to the Indonesian police and army", but in reality they will supervise the behaviour of the Indonesian army and police, "so the army will no longer have a licence to kill, to terrorise". The behaviour of the military itself will determine whether hundreds more UN police will be sent, he says.
Another problem he anticipates is registration of voters. "The Indonesians will get tens of thousands of West Timorese to pose as East Timorese." So in a land where the birth certificate does exist, bloodlines will have to be checked through local communities and chiefs in a process that could get bogged down.
The question of Dr Horta's return to his homeland, after nearly 24 years, is fraught with danger to his life. "In spite of the risks I feel a responsibility to go." But he will go home only when the imprisoned rebel leader Xanana Gusmao is released from house arrest in Jakarta and is free to make a triumphant return to a welcoming party of perhaps 200,000 Timorese. Indonesia's refusal to countenance his release until after August 8th is a tactic to deprive the people of leadership, he says. "They say it is `for his own security'. It is the first time I hear the Indonesians worry about the security of anyone."
"It is as if we had signed an accord to end apartheid in South Africa without freeing Nelson Mandela," he says. The campaign to embarrass Indonesia into freeing Mr Gusmao is backed by a drive to freeze arms sales and aid to Indonesia and to get consumers to boycott Indonesian goods. Since our interview, Horta has threatened Indonesia with a boycott of the referendum if the rebel leader is not freed soon, saying: "We are not going to take part in this farce if Xanana Gusmao and other political prisoners are not freed."
Dr Horta says he is "glad of the Asian financial crisis", because it helped, not only to bring the East Timor issue to a resolution, but also showed the flaws of monetarism and "neo-liberal" economics in the IMF/World Bank approach. "We should name a street after Michel Camdessus," he says of the IMF president.
The Asian crisis pointed up the need for a new development model that avoided cutting social spending, he says.
He thinks of East Timor, a 50 minute flight from Australia, as a future tourist destination. He also imagines his land as a Panama or Liberia, leasing out a "flag of convenience" for shipping and as a "free trade zone".
All this seems to fly in the face of Horta the Marxist, but he defends himself saying that he founded East Timor's first social democratic party, in 1974.
Horta the man is convincing when he dismisses the idea that he will be a minister in a government of independent East Timor. "I'm tired after 23 years of travel, lunches and cocktails." This less serious 49-year-old Horta says he wants to be "Irish Times correspondent in Dili" and to write novels.