Rosa Bonaparte

Who is Rosa Bonaparte?

Rosa Filomena "Muki" Cardoso Bonaparte Soares was born on 18 February 1957 in Manatuto, Portuguese Timor, the eldest of thirteen children. A strong student, she won a scholarship to study in Lisbon in 1973, where she became involved in anti-colonial and leftist politics through the Casa dos Timores community of Timorese students. Following the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, she returned home in September 1974 and became a founding member of Fretilin, one of only three women on its fifty-member central committee. On 28 August 1975 she became the first secretary-general of the Popular Organization of Timorese Women (OPMT), Fretilin's women's wing, authoring its founding manifesto on the "double exploitation" faced by Timorese women under both traditional and colonial structures. Under her leadership the OPMT rapidly grew to roughly seven thousand members and ran childcare centres for orphans, Tetum literacy classes, and health and livelihood programmes. When Indonesian forces invaded Dili, Bonaparte was among those rounded up and executed at the waterfront on 8 December 1975, aged eighteen. In 2006 she was posthumously awarded the Order of Dom Boaventura, one of only four women among sixty-one recipients.

Sources: Wikipedia, Rosa Bonaparte · New Mandala, "East Timor's Red Rosa" · Women4Multilateralism, "Rosa Muki Bonaparte"