The Tragedy of Indonesia
HENEHAN, ANNE
The Tragedy of Indonesia SUKARNO AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY As Told to Cindy Adams Bobbs-Merrill, 324 pp. $6. Reviewed by ANNE HENEHAN Former Assistant Cultural Attache, USIA, Jakarta Sukarno, An...
...still others, such as his foreign minister, Subandrio, and Communist (PKI) boss D.N...
...His spiritual heir, not surprisingly, turns out to be the messiah of a nation -one not destined to suffer the birth pangs of most new nations, to go through the normal, arduous process of economic and political development...
...Gotong-rojong or mutual help was strong among the happy citizens...
...revolutionary in the Orwellian...
...Crops always gave rich harvests...
...Sukarno tells, for instance, how his protocol officer borrowed dishes and silverware from a Chinese restaurant for the first state dinner in the revolutionary capital, Jogjakarta...
...I: No...
...It is a portrait blurred by egotism, but that, after all, is part of the tragedy...
...The lack of candor is perhaps understandable...
...Tell me, how often do you see them...
...Sukarno disposes of Hatta in one succinct paragraph: "The best way to describe Hatta is to relate the afternoon he was en route somewhere and the only other passenger in the car was a beautiful girl...
...He never danced, smiled or enjoyed life...
...I: No, how many times do you see them, President Eisenhower...
...One of the essential ironies of the Indonesian tragedy is that it is unperceived by its principals...
...Food and clothes were cheap...
...What does emerge from this 324 page melange of sermonizing, anecdotal banter, self-justification, historical narrative, paranoid invective, and histrionic rhetoric is a valuable self-portrait of a leading character in a modern tragedy that will not end with a reordering of the political leadership: the tragedy of Indonesia...
...Ugggghh, that man was a hopeless case...
...He: Is that so...
...And I bet you'll never guess who my favorite star is...
...Why has Sukarno prevailed over seemingly more capable leaders such as Mohammed Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir...
...everyone was well-dressed...
...Will the story of Indonesia, like that told in its familiar Mahabarata and Ramayana have a happy ending...
...In a lonely, isolated area, the tire went flat...
...He: Can you guess how many times I see them...
...Kama, the love child of the Sun god and a virgin princess, was brought into the world supernaturally, through his mother's ear...
...Their emphasis was on political education rather than institutionalized demagoguery, on economic organization rather than international adventurism...
...Sukarno, we are told in the very first line, is a lover...
...and Chairul Saleh, now deposed, the very cautious deputy prime minister who was behind but never implicated in the BPS and was one of the few civilian political survivors of the October 1965 coup...
...Had the Dutch, like the British in Malaya, the Americans in the Philippines, or the French in Tunisia, imbued a substantial segment of the population with a basic respect for the Western pragmatic approach to politics and economics, men like Hatta and Sjahrir might have had a chance to turn Indonesia into a politically and economically stable entity...
...Bachelor Hatta was the type who flushed when he met a girl...
...This was his approach to nation-building as well, with escape from unpleasant realities facilitated by disdain for them...
...The book is not without humor...
...I: Adventure stories, history, and biographies...
...Hatta and Sjahrir were both Holland-educated intellectuals and, though fiercely patriotic and antiDutch, were imbued with a basically Western, rational, practical approach to Indonesia's problems...
...There are amusing anecdotes about the improvisation surrounding the conduct of state affairs in the early and genuinely heroic days of the Republic...
...Anything would grow, and grow well...
...He substituted an uncontrolled, totally unconstructive egotism which he called in his 1964 Independence Day speech "the romanticism of the revolution"-romantic in the Wagnerian sense...
...Reviewed by ANNE HENEHAN Former Assistant Cultural Attache, USIA, Jakarta Sukarno, An Autobiography is undeniably an intimate account of the once swashbuckling, now apparently just buckling, Indonesian President's life (he recounts, among other things, how he relieved himself under various awkward circumstances, how he bought brassieres in Los Angeles, how he unwittingly infested the Presidential boudoir with bedbugs, and how he nearly bungled his first kiss...
...Some other prominent personalities in recent Indonesian history are treated in the book...
...Kosala [read Indonesia] was a great and glorious country indeed...
...In both politics and sex, too many revelations about the past may tend to limit future activity, and Sukarno makes clear that he intends to give up neither avocation...
...Instead, Indonesia, blessed-we gather-with a supernatural, mystical bursting into full 20th century flower, rejected such pragmatic bourgeois values as political stability and economic progress to launch a program of bombastic slogans, sports stadiums, international gamesmanship, and the romanticism of the elusive and neverending revolution...
...Rama was a wise and noble king who will be remembered by all men until the very end of time...
...It is interesting to recall that among the youth leaders who opposed Sukarno's conciliatory policy toward Japan during the occupation and who kidnapped him in 1945 were: Sukarni, a leader of the banned Murba or national Communist party, and of the unsuccessful Body for Promotion of Sukarnoism movement of 1964...
...My idea was to stir them passionately...
...There is also a beautiful vignette of a meeting with President Eisenhower: "He: I hear you like movies, President Sukarno...
...He: Randolph Scott...
...He: Every single night...
...There is a eulogy to King Rama at the end of the Ramayana which goes: Under Rama's wise leadership the country became ever more prosperous...
...What kind of film is your favorite...
...When the driver returned with help two hours later, he found the girl snuggled into the farthest edge of the motorcar and Hatta in the other corner snoring away...
...Small wonder, for this is no ordinary man, but the namesake of Kama, the warrior-hero of the Hindu morality classic Mahabarata on which all Javanese are weaned...
...This coup, unlike General Nasution's offensive against the PKI almost exactly 13 years later, failed, and Sukarno, with magnanimous confidence in his ability to control the masses, later forgave all: "Just as that hothead of 1945, His Excellency Chairul Saleh, is today my Third Deputy Prime Minister, so General Nasution is my Defense Minister...
...Best of all," he confesses, "he loves himself...
...Perhaps even more enlightening is Sukarno's half-scolding account of how young Colonel Abdul Haris Nasution led an attempted coup in October 1952 to force Sukarno to dissolve Parliament and get rid of some unpopular politicians...
...Aidit are conspicuous by their absence or cursory mention...
...Sukarno sums up his brief teaching career in the statement: "I never quite assimilated the theory that children must be instructed factually...
...He loves George Washington, Tom Mix, Indonesian sunsets, Francis X. Bushman, Rousseau, Negro spirituals, beautiful women, Thomas Jefferson, and Mary Pickford-all with seemingly impartial ebullience...
...The book, of course, does not take into account the limiting affects of Indonesian Generals, or of age...
...After nearly 400 years of misrule, the Dutch left the Indonesians illiterate, uneducated, subservient, suspicious of anything Western and with an understandable desire to escape into the mythical greatness of the distant past or the even more mythical glory of the elusive future...
...everyone was well-fed...
...But the short-sighted Dutch burghers, evidently content with ruthless and highly profitable economic exploitation, left the few but highly capable Western-educated intellectuals-now mainly members of the banned Socialist and Masjumi parties-facing a population amenable only to the irrational, anti-rational appeal of a Sukarno...
...The reason Sukarno emerged over them can be found in the state of his audience, and here lies the real tragedy of Indonesia...
...I: Three times a week in the palace...
...We never thought alike on any issues...
...Tragedy itself is a concept alien to the predominant Hindu-Javanese culture of Indonesia, whose overriding philosophical premise is expressed in the popular wayang puppet theater: that good will triumph over evil in the end or, in the words of Sukarno, "A hero who only wants to do good is never down forever...
...Quarrels, dishonesty, and theft disappeared from the land...
...It is difficult to envisage an objective historian writing, years hence, a similarly Utopian description of the Sukarno era of Indonesian history, despite this selfglorifying work...
...Why has this self-deluding, oratorical approach to the overwhelming practical problems of Indonesia prevailed...
...Well, I like only Westerns...
...Domestic animals were never tied up at night...
...Many of those crazy young men of earlier days have proved themselves good and loyal assistants...
...But those who expected a Javanese Decameron spiced by the vaudevillian wit of Sukarno's American collaborator, Cindy Adams, will be just as disappointed as those who hoped for a personal yet objective memoir of a historic "multi-complex" period...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 7
