Sukarno

President of Indonesia (1949-1967)

• Born: June 6, 1901
• Birthplace: Surabaja, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia)
• Died: June 21, 1970
• Place of death: Jakarta, Indonesia

A superb orator and a charismatic leader, Sukarno raised Indonesian national consciousness while providing a rudimentary administrative infrastructure under Dutch colonial and Japanese occupational forces. After the Japanese defeat in World War II in 1945, he declared his nation’s independence and served as president and strongman until 1965, when involvement in a communist-inspired coup undermined his authority.

Early Life

According to his autobiography, Sukarno (sew-KAHR-noh) was the child of a Balinese mother of the House of Singaradja and a Javanese father who was a descendant of the sultan of Kediri. Other accounts regard him variously as the illegitimate son of a Dutch coffee planter and a native peasant girl, the offspring of a Eurasian plantation overseer, and the son of Sunan Pakubuwono X of Surakarta, spirited away from the palace to escape death. The circumstances of Sukarno’s birth are obscured by these and similar contradictory stories. There is no question, however, that Sukarno grew up in abject poverty. The Sukarno family of four he had a sister two years his senior lived on a monthly income of the Dutch equivalent of twenty-five rupiahs. Sukarno’s father, Sukemi, a strict schoolteacher and a Muslim, made sure that his son received a good education at his own school in reading, writing, and mathematics, as well as being trained in the Islamic faith, the Indonesian culture, and the Western sciences. Sukarno was graduated from his father’s school in 1914.

While instruction in Islamics and gotong royong (the Indonesian principle of mutual assistance) was readily available, access to Western thought was not. Dutch regulations allowed only a few indigenous students to attend the Dutch schools that were a stepping-stone to higher education in the Netherlands. In spite of financial difficulties, Sukemi sent his son to the Dutch-language elementary school and after two years enrolled him in the Hogere Burger School in Surabaya. Umar Sayed Tjokroaminoto, who had helped Sukemi enroll his son, provided room and board for young Sukarno. Entrance difficulties paled in comparison with the ordeal of an Indonesian youth coping with Dutch schoolboys. Sukarno managed, but he developed a distinct abhorrence for the culture that Dutch education at Surabaya projected. His abhorrence was enhanced by his surroundings at Tjokroaminoto’s, which were suffused with discussions of colonial exploitation of ignorant masses. He was graduated from the Hogere Burger School in 1921.

Following China, India, and the Philippines, Indonesia began its movement for independence in 1908 with the Budi Umoto (pure endeavor) leading to Sarekat Islam (islamic union) in 1912. Headed by Tjokroaminoto, Sarekat attracted a wide spectrum of rural and urban Indonesians. Its membership included the union’s founding merchant class, urban workers, and religious personages. At the time Sukarno arrived in Surabaya, the union claimed eighty branches throughout the archipelago with close to two million members. The contending factions for the union’s leadership were the scripturalists and the Marxists. The former, descendants of Muslim sea merchants who had brought Islam to Indonesia in the fourteenth century, defended the feudal system encompassing Java, Sumatra, Malaya, and Borneo. The latter wished to internationalize the party, educate Indonesia’s peasants, and help them arrive at self-rule. The Marxists’ bid for leadership resulted in the expulsion of Communists from the party in 1920. The party’s subsequent policy of refusing membership to Communists depleted Sarekat’s ranks so that it was clearly on the decline by the time Sukarno left Surabaya.

In 1921, Sukarno moved to Bandung to study engineering at its newly established technical college. The city teemed with political activity, especially among Indonesian youth who had graduated from Dutch universities and who were back home, eager to effect change. Drawing on this body, and equipped with a wealth of political savvy from Tjokroaminoto’s cookshop of nationalism, Sukarno founded a study club in 1925 and transformed it into a political forum, the Nationalist Party of Indonesia (NPI), in 1927. The NPI platform advocated intense struggle for national independence through noncooperation with the Dutch Indies government. Sukarno was elected the party’s chair.

Initially, the Dutch exercised a policy of permissiveness. This allowed the NPI to become the hub of a still larger national coalition, the Association of Political Organizations of Indonesian People. Later, however, to put an end to Sukarno’s bold activities, the Dutch government changed its stance so that, in 1929, governmental troops surrounded the house where Sukarno was a guest, arrested him, and, following a public trial, put him in prison for the next two years. Soon after his release from prison, Sukarno resumed his previous activities as the leader of the NPI. Arrested again in 1933, he was exiled without trial to the Island of Flores; he remained there until 1942, when Japanese forces invading the Sunda Islands freed him.

Life’s Work

Sukarno emerged from exile a distinguished politician. Capitalizing on the Japanese need to reach his masses, he negotiated his way into Indonesian politics by agreeing to cooperate with the Japanese as long as they regarded him as the leader of his country’s nationalists. He also received high-level assurances that he could promote his political aims, which culminated in an independent Indonesia. Satisfied that the Japanese would provide necessary means of communication to educate and unify the Indonesian masses, Sukarno began the distasteful task of placing his people as romushas (male laborers) at the service of the Japanese. Soon after, he founded an advisory council and established the Indonesian military force, Peta. While engaged in administering Japanese affairs, he strengthened his own position as well by placing longtime associates like Mohammad Hatta in important positions throughout the nationalist administrative hierarchy.

By early 1945, it became reasonably clear that Japan could not win the war. To prevent Indonesia’s reversion to its past colonial status, the Japanese established a committee, chaired by Sukarno, to study the implications of making Indonesia independent. The committee recommended Sukarno’s pantja sila nationalism, internationalism, democracy, social democracy, and belief in God as the operative principles for Indonesian merdeka (independence). Soon after, Sukarno and Hatta jointly proclaimed Indonesia’s independence.

The entrance of the Allied armies into the Pacific theater strengthened the Dutch position enough to try to reestablish colonial rule in the archipelago. Sukarno and the nationalists resisted this in the face of Western-inspired embargoes and held steadfastly to their revolutionary capital of Jogjakarta. Furthermore, with world public opinion on their side, they forced the Dutch to accept the United States of Indonesia in 1949 and the Republic of Indonesia in 1950. Sukarno moved to Jakarta and became president of the republic. Sukarno preferred an executive presidency, but, considering that Hatta and others had won the negotiations in the Hague, he conceded most of the power to them. Hatta became the vice president, governing a rather large parliament and interacting with a burgeoning system of parties. Hatta’s task was difficult: He and the president had long-standing differences of opinion on the course that Indonesia should take.

In 1960, Sukarno’s disagreements with Hatta culminated in the latter’s dismissal and the abolition of the one-hundred-member cabinet and the parties. Sukarno then instituted his guided democracy. Based on gotong royong, guided democracy allowed all interested political factions to contribute their views. Unlike Western democracies, however, it did not call for a vote and a resolution. Rather a strongman, in this case Sukarno, weighed those views in private and issued a decree.

Once established as the ultimate authority in domestic affairs, Sukarno directed his attention to international politics. Even though since 1956 the United States had contributed close to one billion dollars to the Indonesian economy, Sukarno all but broke with the United States, saying, “To hell with their dollars!” By siding with Communist China in the Sino-Soviet split, he also affronted Moscow, which had poured close to a billion dollars in armaments into Indonesia. Finally, he recalled his ambassador from the United Nations, claiming that in the dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia the United Nations had sided with Malaysia to appease the capitalists and strengthen their encirclement of the archipelago.

Although he was neglectful of the results, Sukarno’s activities on the international scene affected his decisions at home. He could no longer administer gotong royong impartially and properly. He consistently found himself at odds with the army, which resented the president’s attitude toward the Communists. For their part, the Communists supported Sukarno’s policies, even his senseless wars, and applauded his decisions. Furthermore, freed from contending with the president, the Communists used their energies in penetrating all levels of the civil and military administration that Sukarno had painstakingly put in place over forty years.

The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) was founded in 1914 as a block within the Sarekat Islam on which it drew for membership as well. In spite of factionalism and many setbacks, it successfully fought nationalism and Islam so that by the 1950’s it was already a force with which to be reckoned. The movement came fully into its own under Dipa Nusantara Aidit, a pro-Moscow member who adopted and promoted Sukarno’s philosophy and politics. Within five years of Aidit involvement, the PKI had mustered enough strength in the army alone to attempt a coup in 1965. Ostensibly its purpose was to strengthen Sukarno’s position, but the PKI’s real goal was to bring Indonesia under Communist rule before the ailing president’s death. The coup was not successful. Implicated in the overthrow attempt, Sukarno reverted to the figurehead that he had been before the introduction of guided democracy. Over the next months, the Communist Party was subjected to a systematic bloodbath. Sukarno’s pleas to stop the bloodshed were ignored, while in Java and Bali between 250,000 and 300,000 Indonesians lost their lives. General Suharto became the acting president in 1967 and the president of Indonesia in 1968. Sukarno sank into disgrace and dotage.

Sukarno died of acute kidney poisoning at the age of sixty-nine. Rather than being buried in the garden of his Batu Tulin home as he had wished, he was interred next to his mother at Biltar, perhaps to prevent the institution of a pilgrimage place close to Jakarta. Nevertheless, Indonesians attended his funeral in droves, and a magnificent mausoleum was dedicated to his efforts. Sukarno wore dark glasses, the black cap of the peasant, and the uniform of the military. His countryfolk never questioned his revolutionary zeal. To them he was affectionately known as Bung Karno, Bapak, and the lifetime president of the republic. His personal life was as colorful as his public life. He married seven times, four of the marriages allowed by Islam. He was survived by his only son and several daughters.

Significance

Sukarno and Indonesia grew up together from poverty to presidency and independence respectively. The colorful and charismatic Sukarno, who claimed he was at once Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Marxist, made it possible. As a child Sukarno was attracted to the world of the wayang (shadow play). In that world the dalang (showman) always found a common denominator and made the diversity of the real blend and blend until it assumed the uniformity of the unreal or the shadow. The dalang created harmony among opposing factors. Sukarno’s approach to politics included elements of the wayang. As a Muslim, he exercised mushavirat (discussion and deliberation) and ittifaq (consensus); as an Indonesian, he practiced gotong royong, and as a Marxist he interpreted the outcome as would a socialist. He then expected his people to agree with his views and, more important, to implement them.

Gotong royong, however, belonged to the polity of traditional Java. It could not find its proper place in the 1960’s international arena when Indonesian nationalism was no longer a monolithic opposition of the oppressed against colonialism. Concrete, diverse, and diametrically opposing forces were at work both within and outside Indonesia. Internally, the country cried for economic reform and military discipline. Internationally it needed a ruler who could harness and utilize the potential benefits of Islam, Western technology, marketing, and communism, all contending fiercely for attention in the archipelago. The 1965 coup was Indonesia’s first encounter with international politics.

Bibliography

Brackman, Arnold C. Indonesian Communism: A History. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963. The first full-length history of the Communist Party of Indonesia, this book deals with the genesis of the movement and analyzes its turbulent course between 1920 and 1963. Must reading for understanding how the political parties reacted to the Dutch, the Japanese, and Sukarno.

Dahm, Bernhard. Sukarno and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969. Dahm studies Sukarno’s complex character in the context of the Indonesian concept of Ratu Adil (just savior). His book is a scholarly account of the development of young Sukarno’s career and of his thought before Indonesian independence.

Dake, Antonie C. A. The Sukarno File, 1965-1967: Chronology of a Defeat. Boston: Brill, 2006. In October, 1965, six anti-Communist army generals were kidnapped and murdered in an effort to crush an alleged coup against Sukarno. Dake chronicles the events that culminated in the murders and the subsequent events that led to Sukarno’s ouster from the presidency.

Fischer, Louis. The Story of Indonesia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1959. A journalist with exclusive access to Sukarno, Fischer provides a balanced view of Indonesia’s past and its revolutionary present through interviews with the country’s leaders. Copiously illustrated with a bibliography and an index.

Geertz, Clifford. Islam Observed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Geertz views Islam in Indonesia as an understanding of Islamic principles rather than as a set of accepted dogma. In this context, his discussion of Sukarno differs from those of most other writers.

Hering, Bob. Soekarno: Founding Father of Indonesia, 1901-1945. Leiden, the Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2002. Comprehensive biography based in part on newly obtained information.

Hughes, John. Indonesian Upheaval. New York: David McKay, 1967. This firsthand report deals exclusively with the students’ campaign against Sukarno after the 1965 coup and with the slaughter that ensued.

Hunter, Helen-Louise. Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup: The Untold Story. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2007. Chronicles the events in Indonesia that led to the murder of six top generals who were trying to crush an alleged coup against Sukarno.

Legge, John D. Sukarno: A Political Biography. New York: Praeger, 1972. A complete biography of Sukarno, this book first surveys Sukarno’s actions and words in a general context and then follows with an in-depth analysis of specific questions and issues. This work is necessary reading for understanding Sukarno’s motives, accuracy of his judgment, and leadership capability.

Wilhelm, Donald. Emerging Indonesia. New York: Macmillan, 1980. This book includes four chapters on the rise and fall of Sukarno. Chapter 4, “The Grand Conspiracy,” deals with Sukarno’s involvement in the 1965 Communist coup, leading to his dismissal from office.