Sukarno, also spelled Soekarno,  (born June 6, 1901, Surabaja [now Surabaya], Java, Dutch East Indies—died June 21, 1970, Jakarta, Indonesia), leader of the Indonesian independence movement and Indonesia’s first president (1949–66), who suppressed the country’s original parliamentary system in favour of an authoritarian “Guided Democracy” and who attempted to balance the Communists against the army leaders. He was deposed in 1966 by the army under Suharto.

Early life and education

Sukarno was the only son of a poor Javanese schoolteacher, Raden Sukemi Sosrodihardjo, and his Balinese wife, Ida Njoman Rai. Originally named Kusnasosro, he was given a new and, it was hoped, more auspicious name, Sukarno, after a series of illnesses. Known to his childhood playmates as Djago (Cock, Champion) for his looks, spirits, and prowess, he was as an adult best known as Bung Karno (bung, “brother” or “comrade”), the revolutionary hero and architect of merdeka (“independence”).

Sukarno spent long periods of his childhood with his grandparents in the village of Tulungagung, where he was exposed to the animism and mysticism of serene rural Java. There he became a lifelong devotee of wayang, the puppet shadow plays based on the Hindu epics, as animated and narrated by a master puppeteer, who could hold an audience spellbound through an entire night. As a youth of 15, Sukarno was sent to secondary school in Surabaya and to lodgings in the home of Omar Said Tjokroaminoto, a prominent civic and religious figure. Tjokroaminoto treated him as a cherished foster son and protégé, financed his further education, and eventually married him off at age 20 to his own 16-year-old daughter, Siti Utari.

As a student, Sukarno chose to excel mainly in languages. He mastered Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and modern Indonesian, which, in fact, he did much to create. He also acquired Arabic, which, as a Muslim, he learned by study of the Qurʾān; Dutch, the language of his education; German; French; English; and, later, Japanese. In Tjokroaminoto’s home he came to meet emerging leaders who spanned the rapidly widening national political spectrum, from feudal princelings to fugitive communist conspirators. The eclectic syncretism of the Tjokroaminoto ménage, like the romance and mysticism of wayang, imprinted itself indelibly upon Sukarno’s mind and personality. He was later to treat nation-making as a heroic theatrical, in which the clash of irreconcilable men and ideas could be harmonized through sheer poetic magic—his own.

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Endowed with commanding presence, radiant personality, mellifluous voice, vivid style, a photographic memory, and supreme self-confidence, Sukarno was obviously destined for greatness. In 1927 in Bandung, where he had just acquired a degree in civil engineering, he found his true calling in oratory and politics. He soon revealed himself as a man of charisma and destiny.

Sukarno’s amours were almost as renowned as his oratory. He divorced Siti in 1923 and married Inggit Garnisih, divorcing her in 1943 and marrying Fatmawati, with whom he had five children, including his eldest son, Guntur Sukarnaputra (b. 1944). As a Muslim, Sukarno was entitled to four wives, so he took several more wives in the following decades.

Indonesian independence

For his challenge to colonialism Sukarno spent two years in a Dutch jail (1929–31) in Bandung and more than eight years in exile (1933–42) on Flores and Sumatra. When the Japanese invaded the Indies in March 1942, he welcomed them as personal and national liberators. During World War II the Japanese made Sukarno their chief adviser and propagandist and their recruiter for labourers, soldiers, and prostitutes. Sukarno pressured the Japanese to grant Indonesia its independence and, on June 1, 1945, made the most famous of many celebrated speeches. In it he defined the Pantjasila (Pancasila), or Five Principles (nationalism, internationalism, democracy, social prosperity, and belief in God), still the sacrosanct state doctrine. When the collapse of Japan became imminent, Sukarno at first wavered. Then, after being kidnapped, intimidated, and persuaded by activist youths, he declared Indonesia’s independence (August 17, 1945). As president of the shaky new republic, he fueled a successful defiance of the Dutch, who, after two abortive “police actions” to regain control, formally transferred sovereignty on December 27, 1949.

From his revolutionary capital in Yogyakarta (formerly Jogjakarta), Sukarno returned in triumph to Jakarta on December 28, 1949. There he established himself, his collection of paintings, and his numerous retinue in the splendid palace of the Dutch governors-general. He proceeded to preside urbanely over a spectacle that was at once diverting and disturbing. His increasingly numerous and outspoken critics maintained that Sukarno inspired no coherent programs of national organization and administration, rehabilitation, and development, such as were quite clearly necessary. He seemed instead to conduct a continuous series of formal and informal audiences and a nightly soiree of receptions, banquets, music, dancing, movies, and wayang. Indonesian politics became increasingly frenzied, with Sukarno himself engaged in devious maneuvers that made stabilization impossible. The Indonesian economy foundered while Sukarno encouraged the wildest of extravagances. To be sure, the nation scored impressive gains in health, education, and cultural self-awareness and self-expression. It achieved, in fact, what Sukarno himself most joyously sought and acclaimed as “national identity,” an exhilarating sense of pride in being Indonesian. But this achievement came at a ruinous cost.

After “dreaming” in late 1956 of “burying” the feuding political parties in Indonesia and thus achieving national consensus and prosperity, Sukarno dismantled parliamentary democracy and destroyed free enterprise. He ordained “Guided Democracy” and “Guided Economy” for the achievement of Manipol-Usdek and Resopim-Nasakom—arcane acronyms symbolizing policies but signifying dictatorship.

Sukarno’s personal and political excesses, as epitomized eventually by his neo-Marxist, crypto-communist ideology and his infamous cabinet of 100 corrupt and cynical ministers, induced a continuous state of national crisis. Sukarno narrowly escaped recurrent attempts at assassination, the first in 1957. Regional insurrections broke out in Sumatra and Sulawesi in 1958. Inflation escalated the cost-of-living index from 100 in 1958 to 18,000 in 1965 and on up wildly to 600,000 in 1967. In 1963, after shouting repeatedly “To hell with your aid” (1950–65 total: U.S. $1,000,000,000), Sukarno all but broke with the United States. After having exacted U.S. $1,000,000,000 in Soviet armaments and other items, he next affronted Moscow.

On January 20, 1965, Indonesia formally withdrew from the United Nations because the latter supported Malaysia, which Sukarno had vowed to “crush” as “an imperialist plot of encirclement.” Yet, until 1965, Sukarno was still able to stir the Indonesian masses to near-hysterical belligerency. Millions of Indonesians sang and shouted his slogans and acclaimed Sukarno as “Great Leader of the Revolution,” “Lifetime President” (his official title), and oracle and warrior of the Nefo—his acronym for the “New Emerging Forces”—in violent conflict with Nekolim—the neocolonialism, capitalism, and imperialism of the “doomed” Western powers.

The coup of 1965

The nation was shocked and shaken out of its trance by an abortive coup on September 30, 1965. A clique of military conspirators calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and killed six top army generals, seized a few key urban points, and proclaimed a new revolutionary regime. General Suharto, the commander of the Jakarta garrison, swiftly reversed the coup.

Suharto and the military generally believed the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia; PKI)—which to some measure had been supported and protected by Sukarno—to be behind the attempted coup. The PKI, by contrast, understood the plot to be entirely a military matter. There ensued an oblique contest for power between Suharto and Sukarno, during which thousands of communists and alleged communists were slaughtered by the military; estimates of the number of people killed during the purge range from 80,000 to more than 1,000,000. As the country recoiled in horror, activist youths demanded the political demise of Sukarno, the Sukarnoists, and Sukarnoism and the total reform and reorganization of the state. On March 11, 1966, Sukarno was obliged to delegate wide powers to Suharto, who subsequently became acting president (March 1967) and then president (March 1968), as Sukarno sank into disgrace and dotage.

Sukarno died at the age of 69 of a chronic kidney ailment and numerous complications. Suharto decreed a quick and quiet funeral. Nevertheless, at least 500,000 persons, including virtually all of Jakarta’s important personages, turned out to pay their last ambivalent respects. The next day another 200,000 assembled in Blitar, near Surabaya, for the official service followed by burial in a simple grave alongside that of his mother. The cult and ideology of Sukarnoism were proscribed until the late 1970s, when the government undertook a rehabilitation of Sukarno’s name. His autobiography, Sukarno, was published in 1965.