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He gave unity to Indonesia, dignity to the downtrodden
and anxiety to the powerful, who finally brought him down
By PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER
He united his country and set it free. He liberated his people from a sense of inferiority
and made them feel proud to be Indonesian--no small achievement, coming after 350 years of Dutch colonial rule
and three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation. What Sukarno did on Aug. 17, 1945 was no different from what
Thomas Jefferson had done for Americans on July 4, 1776. Perhaps even more: Sukarno was the only Asian leader of
the modern era able to unify people of such differing ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds without shedding
a drop of blood. Compare his record with that of Suharto, his successor, who killed or imprisoned hundreds of thousands
of people to establish his New Order regime.
Bung (Brother) Karno, as Indonesians liked to call him, was born in the first year
of the new century, on June 6, 1901, the son of a minor Javanese aristocrat and his Balinese wife. Talented in
both athletics and academics, he became one of the few Indonesians admitted to Dutch-language schools; it was when
his father sent him to Surabaya to attend one such secondary school that he met and boarded with the country's
preeminent nationalist, Tjokroaminoto. Through him Sukarno would be inducted into the freedom struggle. With his
captivating oratorical skills, however, the younger man would go on to outshine his mentor.
In 1929, two years after helping found the organization that would become the Partai Nasional Indonesia, Sukarno
was put on trial by the Dutch. His self-defense, which lasted two days, was a rhetorical masterpiece, and when
he was released in 1931 huge crowds turned out to greet their new hero. In years to come Sukarno would use that
gift to instill in Indonesians a sense of themselves as a unified people--not Javanese and Balinese and Acehnese
and Sumatrans. He put his career, even his life, on the line for the unity and peace of his nation. This is his
great heritage, even if today the country is threatened with disintegration as a result of Suharto's policies.
But history has not been kind to Sukarno. These days many in the West remember the
glamorous revolutionary as a debauch and a demagogue--the man who told Western countries to go to hell with their
aid and pulled Indonesia out of the United Nations. Yet when he and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed independence in 1945,
many Western politicians and intellectuals saw Sukarno as a new light shining among the backward countries. Their
admiration faded only after a new Satan was found roaming the world: communism.
Sukarno called this the "century of the awakening of the colored peoples," as they threw off the shackles
of Western colonialism. He played a leading role in the process, initiating the historic Asia-Africa Conference
at Bandung in 1955, after which the Non-Aligned Movement spread to Latin America. Sukarno also called this the
"century of intervention," a time when the great powers could interfere at will in the affairs of smaller
countries. Often, this intervention was the work of the intelligence community--a power within a power, a state
within a state, entrusted with the task of eliminating communism from the face of the earth. In Asia, Africa and
Latin America, the strategy was to back military governments as bulwarks against the Red Menace. Repressive regimes
like Mobutu's in Africa or Suharto's in Asia received the West's blessing as long as the repression was carried
out in the name of democracy and the suppression of communism.
In this climate, Sukarno was no longer seen as another Thomas Jefferson, but instead
as someone who might allow communism to expand its influence. The campaign against him began from the slander that
he had been a Japanese collaborator during the war. This was followed by the accusation that, in his final years
in power, he had become a dictator.
Are these accusations true? Was Sukarno a Japanese collaborator? Even when he was in a Dutch jail in the 1930s,
Sukarno wrote to the colonial administration suggesting, in vain, that the Dutch cooperate with Indonesian nationalists
to guard against Japanese fascism. Instead, when Japan invaded Indonesia, the Dutch surrendered the country and
its people, including Sukarno in his prison.
That he then cooperated with the occupiers is undisputed. But he did so with the backing of fellow nationalist
leader Hatta, and he used his influence to the advantage of his country. As he himself admitted, Sukarno did recruit
thousands of manual laborers for the Japanese Army, most of whom perished during the war. Yet he also used the
Japanese radio network to nurture a sense of nationalism throughout the archipelago. What honest observer can fault
Sukarno for taking the opportunity to awaken the consciousness of the people to the struggle for freedom? Under
the noses of the occupiers, he used his oratorical skills to arouse people who had been asleep for centuries and
to prepare them to fight for independence when the moment arrived. It was thus that the world witnessed the heroism
of Indonesian youth when they fought the Allied armies that landed in Surabaya to retake Indonesia for the Dutch
on Nov. 10, 1945.
Was Sukarno a dictator? He did not have the character of a dictator. He was motivated
and inspired by the ideas of the West, especially democracy, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.
And what about Guided Democracy, the executive-dominated electoral system he instituted in 1959? Sukarno was President
for two decades, but he wielded real power only in the last six years of his rule--the period of Guided Democracy.
Why did he create such a system? Perhaps because of his commitment to democracy. By this point, Indonesia had no
fewer than 60 political parties and faced the prospect of a new government every few months. Sukarno reorganized
the 60 parties into 11--all of which retained their independence. It was a political necessity, he said.
Sukarno's critics called it a dictatorship. Yet six years later, when he was removed following a shadowy coup (allegedly
a communist uprising gone wrong), he was replaced by a true dictatorship--that of Suharto. Sukarno died in 1970,
a man whose dreams of a free and peaceful Indonesia had been hijacked by a violent and stifling military rule.
Lately, Sukarno's reputation has begun to be re-examined. Suharto was ousted in 1998,
after three decades in power; earlier this year, Sukarno's daughter Megawati triumphed in the first truly free
general election in 44 years. It was, in a way, Bung Karno's triumphant political comeback.
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