'Here Lies Bung Karno'

...Brothers and sisters, let us become logs to feed the flames of revolution...

...But our ideals will not be realized easily...

...He was a faddist with an uncanny knack for striking the popular chord??anti-colonialism, anti-Americanism, Socialism??and playing it until his people were delirious with nationalist frenzy...

...No doubt some Indonesians have admired Sukarno for his bedtime feats, but others have strongly criticized him...

...His sense of outrage, his drive to annihilate his persecutors, real and imagined, was exacerbated by his family's failure to live up to the standards of other Indonesians of approximately the same social status...

...Forty years of my life I have given to the struggle against necolim," he declared last June before Congress first considered the question of voting him out of office...

...Modulating his voice from loud to soft, clasping his hands, jutting his forefinger into the air??Sukarno knew all the tricks of the orator's art and, more impressive, he knew how to use them in a five or 10 minute sequence...

...General Suharto reminded the People's Consultative Congress, Indonesia's highest policy-making By Donald Kirk body, before it voted to strip Sukarno of his last remaining power...

...Sukarno's father was an impoverished schoolteacher, a disciplinarian who drove his son to study and lead, and who smarted under his own inability to provide more than a two-room house with a leaky roof beside an open sewer ??the kind of home in which millions of Indonesians still live...

...He sensed that Sukarno's followers, even if they were militarily powerless (which they are not), might create enough difficulties over the years to endanger the national unity that Sukarno fought to build...

...He was, in the opinion of one colleague, "the perfect blend of Javanese obscurantism, Balinese extroversion and Sundanese (West Javan) mercurial changeability...

...He was arrested by the Dutch at least a dozen times, almost invariably for his fire-eating speeches...

...In private life, he was a charmer who beguiled the most suspicious of critics, a total egotist who jailed his enemies and was incapable of accepting suggestions...

...He played it so thoroughly that he finally lost himself in his own dreams and became a frustrated zealot in search of a new revolution...

...And Indonesia hasn't collapsed yet...

...Sukarno was living in the past...

...Sukarno's lust for women apparently was part of his desire for a sense of mastery over his countrymen??and the foreigners whom he hates and admires...

...a little man with little ownership, little tools, sufficient to himself," Sukarno wrote...

...He was a showman, an orator who could move an audience to tears or laughter, to friendship or to war??and to unquestioning, unreasoning support of his policies...

...If Sukarno has not been totally destroyed, however, he has certainly arrived at the end of the most important phase of his career...

...After preaching hate against the West, he himself became the object of widespread hatred...

...Buoyed by the popularity of his Socialist policies, he gave up even a pretense of non-alignment, idolized Communist China abroad, supported the Communists at home and generally veered further to the Left than ever before...

...Once so quick to perceive the longings of the masses, Sukarno was too engrossed in old slogans to realize what his people wanted now...

...At that time righteous Moslem women demonstrated outside his Jakarta palace in defense of Madame Fatmawati...

...By extolling Indonesia's "Great Revolution," he inspired young revolutionaries to rebel against him...

...After branding Western-educated liberals and anti-Communists as spokesmen for the "old order," the President was denounced for leading the corrupt "old order" against the purebred reformists of the "new order...

...If his crowning accomplishment was his success at uniting Indonesia and holding it together, his final failure was his inability to overcome his anti-colonial complex and get on with the business of developing his country...

...Our tens of millions of impoverished souls work for no person and no person works for them...

...Imperialist, this is what we demand of you.'" The Dutch police broke up the meeting, but Sukarno realized that he had found the formula for quick success in an era of incipient revolt all over Asia...

...In those years Sukarno transferred the full fury of his anti-Dutch complex to the United States and Britain...

...He rejected associations with the Dutch and glorified Indonesia??its history and recent struggles against the Dutch, its eating habits and styles of dress, its artistic and musical achievements...

...The simplest way to describe Sukarno is to say that he is a great lover," was how Sukarno began his autobiography...

...A wide range of generals, politicians and religious leaders, including those with strongly anti-Communist reputations, appeared to side with Sukarno for short-term political gains...

...once an American information official in Jakarta, wrote in the New York Times Magazine during the Colonels Revolt of 1958 that "the famous Sukarno luck has seemed less reliable...

...I like my pleasures, I have earned them...

...That is why I, who have been given the topmost leadership in the struggle of the Indonesian nation, never tire of appealing and exhorting: solve our national problems in a revolutionary way, make the revolutionary spirit surge on, see to it that the fire of our revolution does not die or grow dim...

...He had, he thought, defeated stronger opposition before...

...Sukarno's allies??as well as some of his enemies now in power??come largely from a narrow veneer of upper-class Indonesians...

...He mouthed brave words for the millions but played backstairs politics with quiet cunning...

...He loves his country, he loves his people, he loves women, he loves art, and, best of all, he loves himself...

...And yet, as the revolutionary who galvanized the Indonesian masses against the Dutch, Sukarno played exactly that role...

...he asked triumphantly...

...Sukarno dramatized his words bv roaring "Merdeka, Mer-deka, Merdeka" ("Freedom, Freedom, Freedom") at the end of every speech...

...Crush the imperialists," he shouted, as if Indonesia, now in pathetic economic straits, could even "crush Malaysia," a country one tenth its size...

...Sukarno often boasted that both his parents were of noble blood and that relatives of his had died leading the first battles against the Dutch in the 19th century...

...While he did not try to defend his former foreign minister, Dr...

...If the Sultan of Jogjakarta could have numerous wives and hundreds of children, then he could also enjoy such pleasures...

...Unfortunately for Hanna, Sukarno's luck soon resumed its normal course...

...But being blinded by the glare of his bygone popularity, he did not realize until too late that his consummate political finesse would not suffice to overcome what he had thought was only a temporary movement of "hooligans and discontented students...

...Let us today resort to a policy of self-reliance" (another Sukarno slogan), he declared at a meeting in Bandung in the 1920s...

...Sukarno routinely asked his diplomats abroad to supply him with girls and, accompanied by a retinue of security men, often patronized the nightclubs and red-light districts of the cities he visited...

...Marie-Antoinette hardly put it worse...

...The explanation for this phenomenon is partly that Socialism was coming into vogue in the early decades of this century among revolutionaries throughout the world...

...He is our first and only President...

...Subandrio??sentenced to death for supporting the Communists??or other allies jailed since the coup, he could not compromise on the revolutionary ideal on which he had based his entire career...

...One favorite story among Western newsmen covering Jakarta was about an American diplomat who carefully explained to a correspondent how Indonesia was inevitably headed for economic collapse "in a few months...

...He had an affair with a Russian translator for several years and also was famed for his exploits with airline stewardesses...

...Perhaps the most startling contradiction about Bung Karno, at least superficially, was that he rose to power on an ideology of Socialism...

...who still is technically Sukarno's "first wife," and a delegation informed him that Hartini had had several lovers, not to mention the husband who was divorcing her...

...Sukarno then reeled off some 20 names...

...Sukarno had literally lost control of his senses...

...Yet Sukarno was the last person qualified to offer such advice...

...Marhaen is a common Sundanese name which Sukarno, with his flare for popular appeal, adopted to describe his personal philosophy regarding the plight of the average man...

...And it is equally unlikely that he will again be a popular figure with the ability to sway millions of his countrymen simply by the sound of his voice and the beauty of his words...

...The Indonesian Army soundly defeated the rebels on the outer islands, and Sukarno jailed many of his worst political enemies...

...In the intervening five or six years before the coup, Sukarno reached the pinnacle of his career...

...Let us stop begging...

...Sukarno, in short, emulated the ways of the colonial governors whom he succeeded??and the sultans who preceded the colonialists...

...We are looking for a new system...

...We became cowardly??afraid to sit, afraid to stand, because whichever we did was wrong...

...Don't wriggle like American or French girls," the Bung exhorted Indonesian guides before they left for the New York World's Fair in 1964...

...But Sukarno was no ordinary upper-class Indonesian rebel...

...We must struggle for them...

...I am inspired by revolution...

...In his final months of power Sukarno periodically frightened the military establishment and hostile politicians by his unbelievable ability to marshal support just when it seemed he had finally been destroyed...

...Instead, let us shout, 'Mr...

...Future generations may say we acted too harshly...

...Sukarno's ideals were intrinsically attached to his own personal power...

...From such beginnings...

...We live and die for Bung Karno" was one of their slogans before Indonesia's anti-Communist leaders had finished reducing the President to a figurehead role...

...Once a crusader against vested interests and corruption, he could not begin to withdraw from the mire of corruption into which he and his allies had gradually sunk after shaking off their colonial oppressors...

...Witness a speech he made at an Independence Day rally several years ago: "I belong to that group of people who are bound in spiritual longing by the romanticism of the revolution," Sukarno told some 100,000 people who jammed the vast square in front of his palace in Jakarta...

...All Americans were spies, all Western correspondents (except an occasional favorite) were necolim agents, all Indonesian political foes were hired hands of the imperialist enemy...

...But Sukarno surprised his critics??notably the new Foreign Minister, Adam Malik??by the stubbornness with which he clung to his Leftist beliefs...

...Marhaenism is Indonesian Socialism in operation...

...Sukarno was driven by his parents' inner urge not only to defeat the Dutch, whom they blamed overtly for their troubles, but also to compete with well-to-do Indonesians who still prospered and could afford to have their children educated abroad...

...Sukarno had introduced the heady concept of revolution and let it devour him to the point where he was no longer capable of governing...

...Those who opposed him were ipso facto enemies of the state and the "great revolution...

...Sukarno maintained his vision to the last...

...He built monuments and hotels, stadiums and meeting halls, and hardly seemed to notice that the streets and railroads were deteriorating, that factories were running at 15 per cent of capacity, that the country, rich in agricultural and mineral potential, was not producing enough rice to feed its people...

...The youths who rebelled against Sukarno in the past year claimed that they, too, were acting to relieve "the people's suffering...

...The delegation left without another word...

...In a patronizing way, Sukarno must have sympathized with the yearnings of the Indonesian masses, whose living standards are among the world's lowest...

...Willard Hanna...

...From his superficial study of Marx and other Western thinkers, including Lincoln and Toynbee, he concocted a potpourri of watered-down theories lumped together under the improbable title of "Marhaenism...

...We were continuously told we were a nation with brains like cotton wool," Sukarno recalls...

...In the end Sukarno was hoisted by his own petard...

...The Dutch children never played with native children," Sukarno complains in his autobiography...

...After Indonesia finally gained full independence from the Netherlands in 1949...

...Our ideal is an automobile for everybody," he announced in 1946, shortly after declaring independence...

...At this crucial juncture, then, it seems appropriate to examine the qualities that first propelled Sukarno to the height of power and then brought about his downfall...

...They were the good, the pure, the snow-white Westerners and they looked down on me because I was the native or 'inlander.' " The book is full of chip-on-shoulder references to snubs at the hands of colonial officials...

...Then, after the War, he allied with Indonesians whom he privately disliked and later cast off as too "liberal" or opposed to his personal power...

...Sukarno admits that his first amours were the fair-skinned, pink-cheeked Dutch girls whom he always found unattainable, particularly when their angry fathers rejected his pleas to let him marry them...

...Sukarno was typically Indonesian...

...Likewise, in internal politics, Sukarno skillfully played off the leading elements in the Indonesian power structure??the Armed Forces, the Communists and the religious groups??and tried to keep the country united around the slogan of Nasakom, the acronym for nationalism, religion and Communism...

...An obviously paranoid personality deeply suspicious of those who remotely suggested a threat to his position, he now lost his ability to differentiate on an individual basis...

...His bodyguards toured Indonesia in search of the comeliest answers to their leader's desires, and Sukarno was known to marry a girl one day and discard her the next...

...If a sultan had seemingly limitless funds at his disposal, then Sukarno and his cronies were also entitled to their share ot the government treasury...

...Sukarno convinced Indonesians that their vision of greatness would soon be a fact...

...One manifestation of Sukarno's emotional ambivalence toward the West and his own peers at home??as well as his extreme sensuality??was his yearning for beautiful women...

...When driven into a corner earlier in his career, Sukarno showed a hard-headed, altogether rational facility for compromising...

...Sukarno took the precaution, however, of trying to keep his next marriage??to the former Japanese bar hostess Ratna Sari Dewi??a state secret...

...Similarly, the feudal pomp and pretense of Sukarno's palaces and titles (he had some 50 of them, including "President for Life," "Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces" and "Great Leader of the Revolution") reflected his inner urge to exceed both the Dutch governors and the most powerful rulers of Javanese history...

...He preached an all-or-nothing policy against colonialists and imperialists but knew how to compromise...

...If he does not flee Indonesia, the Army will try to keep him in obscurity, and certainly would not want him memorialized after death as the mouthpiece for millions of his countrymen...

...Sukarno was a sloganeer who, at 65, could not bring himself to shout the new slogans that had captivated his people...

...Sukarno's unparalleled popularity, particularly in the densely populated regions of Central and East Java, accounts for the extreme caution with which Acting President Suharto and Indonesia's other new leaders have gradually eased him out...

...Almost from infancy he was beset with the anti-colonial, often ethnic sense of hatred that has characterized all leaders of national independence movements...

...Be Indonesian in all your actions...

...The first time I saw Sukarno, six weeks after the coup last October 1, he was talking from the stage of the state palace in Jakarta...

...Even women who rejected him physically were relegated to this category in his demented mind...

...My whole life I have dedicated to our great revolution...

...Until wrongly becoming convinced of Indonesia's greatness, he deftly played the West against the Soviet Union and charmed President Kennedy by describing himself as an implacable foe of Communism...

...The attache ended the interview by remarking: "Those figures are all four years old...

...He could have been a Broadway actor or movie star," a first secretary in the American Embassy once remarked with a note of awe in his voice...

...I reacted to the poverty and tragedy in which I was brought up," he often told newsmen with whom he was on close terms...

...Journalists and scholars who predicted Sukarno's imminent downfall were also disillusioned...

...He also took over the colonial governor's mansions in Jakarta and in Bogor, 40 miles south of the capital, and turned them into his own private estates...

...Did you know she's been sleeping with all of them too...

...Sukarno, far more than any other leader of Indonesia's independence movement, helped to unite the Indonesian people, 65 million in 1945 and 110 million today, separated from one another by dozens of linguistic, religious, ethnic and regional barriers and often overcome by a tropical torpor that saps the will to work and fight...

...Sukarno, in fact, was a man consumed by his own slogans...

...I am fascinated by it...

...Donald Kirk is currently a correspondent in Southeast Asia for the McGraw-Hill World News Service...

...Revolutions are not won by bread alone...

...Whatever slogans he used, Sukarno offered Indonesians a vision of national greatness achieved through revolution...

...Even in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, on the northern coast of West Java, silent but stubborn pro-Sukarnoists, some of them Communists untouched by the deadly anti-Communist purge that recently swept the country, intrigue for their leader's return...

...But Sukarno was more than a great lover...

...If he later misjudged the strength of his anti-Communist generals, it was because he had proved strikingly successful in keeping Indonesia united in the early years after independence...

...He collaborated with the Japanese in World War II in hopes of speeding up Indonesia's independence...

...The irony of Bung Karno's rebellion, of course, is that while he campaigned against the Dutch, he really yearned to be like the Dutch, and the West in general...

...he drove in chauffeured Cadillac limousines, wore shirts from Saks Fifth Avenue and regaled himself in Western-style uniforms...

...In that period Sukarno had an unnerving way of upsetting Western predictions about his future, especially after he jettisoned Indonesia's Western-style democracy in favor of his own near-dictatorial Guided Democracy...

...We are going to change this world to a new world of happiness," Sukarno announced in a typical speech a few years ago...

...After the coup, Indonesian youths carried signs proclaiming "No Geishas here," and Madame Dewi returned to Japan several months ago...

...He again showed his flare for showmanship by arriving at another meeting wearing a pitji, the black hat until then worn mainly by men of lower class origins...

...It is not inconceivable that he will try to stage a comeback, but it is almost unthinkable that he will regain the position he once had...

...Often trained in Dutch universities, they wanted desperately to retrieve the status and power their families once had...

...Suharto would have preferred to wait until after a general election for a new Congress before dealing the President the ultimate humiliation...

...He could hardly have suspected that the final revolution would dislodge him from power in favor of the next generation of Indonesian revolutionaries...

...Once more Sukarno revealed himself as the showy faddist whose forte was borrowing from a widespread intellectual movement??in this case the Leftist-dominated support for China and the emerging Socialist nations??and translating it into popular terms...

...His megalomania??rational at first in terms of Indonesia's struggle for independence ??knew no limits...

...Marhaenism was the first of literally scores of catchwords and slogans that Sukarno made up or borrowed to arouse the revolutionary imagination of his countrymen...

...Not surprisingly, in later years Sukarno quarreled with some of Indonesia's wealthy Western-educated politicians despite their bitter anti-colonial proclivities...

...We are in the midst of a great Leftist revolution," he still insisted after the coup, although the country's economy had gone backward rather than forward since independence...

...Come then, keep fanning the flames of the leaping fire of revolution...

...If a sultan had the right to the prettiest girls in his territory, then surely Sukarno need settle for nothing less...

...For Sukarno, who was more a showman than an intellectual, Socialism was a theme that he could embrace in speeches and writings to provoke the masses into supporting his revolt...

...After the coup, when the country was immersed in an informal yet bloody civil war, Sukarno remained obsessed with his revolution and the wrongs??real and imagined??of the imperialist powers...

...He has adamantly opposed all demands for trying Sukarno on charges of having supported the Communists' unsuccessful coup d'etat of October 1, 1965...

...Remember the message of the people's suffering," the students shouted, and he replied, "We should not be concerned about the people's stomachs...

...especially after his marriage to Madame Hartini in 1954...

...A Marhaenist is a person with small means...

...Sukarno was realistic enough to admit that eventually he would have to die, but he wanted to make certain that future generations would immortalize him as both the father of his country and the leader of the Afro-Asian world??the "new emerging forces," as he always called the former colonial countries...

...If a sultan had an enormous palace and elite guard, then Sukarno had two palaces (four or five, if you count his other estates) and his own regiment of 2,000 men...

...In a predominantly Moslem country whose well-off citizens often take more than one wife, Sukarno is said to have wed at least 18 times and still has five legal wives, one more than Indonesia's legal limit...

...One key to Sukarno's success, beyond his insatiable desire for power and wealth, was the skill with which he not only developed these slogans but presented them in speeches that could move the most discriminating Indonesian intellectuals as well as the simple Marhaens...

...In a sense Sukarno was fighting not for the mass of Indonesians, whose income and way of life has changed little since independence, but for a small class of educated Indonesians who really wanted the nation to be ruled again by princes and sultans...

...EPITAPH FOR A REVOLUTIONARY 'Here Lies Bung Karno' By Donald Kirk Deep in Central Java dusty, grinning youths still shout "Hidup Bung Karno"??Long Live Brother Karno"??at clandestine meetings and rallies...

...He preached "the message of the people's suffering," and the people listened...

...He's got that kind of talent...

...Sukarno's greatest contribution to Indonesia's development was born of his resentment of the Dutch...

...The son of a Balinese mother and a Javanese father...

...When later I am dead," Sukarno was fond of saying, "please do not write on my tombstone, 'Here lies his excellency Sukarno, first President of the Republic of Indonesia.' No, merely write, 'Here lies Bung Karno, mouthpiece of the Indonesian people.' " The tragedy of Sukarno is that this wish will probably never be fulfilled...

...I couldn't understand a word of Indonesian, but he was still the best speaker I have ever seen or heard...

...Indeed, Indonesian newsmen were forbidden to photograph him hatless...

...There is no exploitation of one man by another...

...Though he stayed in a bungalow on the grounds of the Bogor palace and not in the mansion itself, he still gave Indonesia's fanciest, most publicized parties in the same ballroom where colonial governors once entertained...

...Sukarno called on all these qualities in his death-struggle for political survival...

...I am completely absorbed by it...

...he was a megalomaniac with a naive vision of national grandeur that placed him in the role of an ancient sultan...

...Sukarno has rationalized his hedonistic pursuits (without admitting their extent) by harking back to the difficult years in which he was fighting for Indonesia's independence...

...He was equally lascivious on his overseas junkets...

...In speech after speech he denounced the two countries until he really had no choice but to make war...

...Sukarno's approach had much in common with militant civil rights leaders today...

...He is a spoiled old man," Malik once told newsmen, but actually Sukarno displayed a rat-like tenacity and courage that few had previously suspected...

...In intervening years Sukarno has been pictured to often wearing a pitji that it would be hard to imagine him bare-headed...

...He demanded undying loyalty from his allies but deserted them in their hour of need...

...The result was Indonesia's ill-fated "confrontation" against British-backed Malaysia, a conflict that lasted from 1963-66 and cost the government considerably more than 50 per cent of its budget each year...

...We became a nation which could only whisper, 'Yes, sir.' " As a student, first in the dirty, sweltering East Javan capital of Surabaja and later in Bandung, the cool, tree-shaded capital of West Java, Sukarno fought physically with young Dutch boys and verbally with their parents, the Dutch colonial authorities...

...Socialism provided the framework within which intellectuals could justify their defiance of the capitalists and imperialists...