Sukarno

Sukarno: The Architect Who Built a Nation

At ten o'clock on the morning of 17 August 1945, in the front yard of a house on Jalan Pegangsaan Timur in Jakarta, a 44-year-old civil engineer read out a two-sentence text he had drafted overnight at a Japanese admiral's residence. Roughly five hundred people heard it. The Dutch empire it dissolved had lasted three centuries, and it would take four more years of war and diplomacy before the Netherlands conceded. Sukarno had no army, no treasury and no recognised state — only a voice, and the conviction that seventeen thousand islands could be argued into becoming one country.

The Engineer From Surabaya

He was born in Surabaya on 6 June 1901 and named Koesno Sosrodihardjo; following Javanese custom he was renamed after surviving a childhood illness. The parentage was itself a small national allegory: a Muslim Javanese schoolteacher father from Grobogan, a Hindu Balinese mother of Brahmin caste. He passed from a native primary school into the Dutch system and then to the Technische Hoogeschool at Bandung, taking an Ingenieur degree in civil engineering with an architectural emphasis in 1926. The training never left him. He set up the firm Soekarno & Anwari, assisted the Dutch architect Charles Prosper Wolff Schoemaker on the renovated Preanger Hotel in 1929, and designed private houses across Bandung. Decades later, as president, he was still drawing — the Proclamation Monument, the Youth Monument in Semarang, the new city of Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan, and a proposed roof for the main stadium of the Gelora Bung Karno complex.

He was also a formidable linguist, moving between Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Indonesian, Dutch, German, English, French, Arabic and Japanese — a facility contemporaries attributed to a near-photographic memory, and one that made him dangerous to a colonial state that governed by controlling who could speak to whom.

Indonesia Accuses

On 4 July 1927 he co-founded the Indonesian National Party, the PNI, which fused anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, secularism and ethnic unity into a single programme for the whole archipelago. The Dutch arrested him on 29 December 1929. His 1930 trial at Bandung became the opposite of what the prosecution intended: his defence speeches, delivered under the title *Indonesia Accuses*, were reported at length and turned a detained agitator into a national figure. Released early on 31 December 1931, he wrote his way back into custody — a 1933 series called *To Attain Independent Indonesia* brought a second arrest, and this time the Governor-General, Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge, exiled him without trial precisely so there could be no courtroom platform. He spent 1934 onward in Ende on Flores, then from February 1938 in Bengkulu on Sumatra's west coast.

The Bargain With Japan

When Japan invaded in January 1942, the retreating Dutch abandoned him near Padang. Japanese commanders, seeing a man who could mobilise Java, treated him with care, and Sukarno made a calculation he never fully escaped: collaboration in exchange for the right to spread nationalist ideas to a mass audience. He led POETERA from March 1943, produced slogans against the Allies, and in November 1943 was decorated by Emperor Hirohito in Tokyo. The cost was borne by others. The romusha forced-labour system, which he helped promote and about which he later expressed lasting shame, and Japanese food requisitioning that killed more than a million people in Java in 1944–45, are inseparable from the platform he gained.

That platform produced Pancasila. Addressing the Japanese-created preparatory committee on 1 June 1945, he set out five principles — nationalism, internationalism, democracy by consensus, social justice, and belief in God — designed to be acceptable simultaneously to Muslims, Christians, Hindus, communists and Javanese aristocrats. The Jakarta Charter of 22 June initially obliged Muslims to follow Islamic law; that clause was struck before the constitution took effect on 18 August, a deletion that has been contested in Indonesia ever since.

Revolution and the Long Argument

Independence was declared under duress — impatient youth leaders kidnapped a hesitating Sukarno to Rengasdengklok on 16 August 1945 to force his hand. What followed was four years of guerrilla war, negotiation and reversal: the Battle of Surabaya against British Indian forces in November 1945, the retreat of the government to Yogyakarta, the Linggadjati and Renville agreements, two Dutch offensives, and Sukarno's own imprisonment on Bangka. He allowed himself to be captured in December 1948 while telegraphing authority to an emergency government in West Sumatra — a gamble that internationalised the conflict. American pressure on Marshall Aid did the rest. Sovereignty was transferred on 27 December 1949.

Guided Democracy

The parliamentary republic that followed was chronically unstable, its cabinets collapsing across the fault lines between the nationalist PNI, the Islamist Masyumi and the communist PKI, while Darul Islam and regional colonels waged open rebellion. Sukarno's answer was to declare Western parliamentary democracy unsuited to Indonesia and to substitute himself as guide. Vice-President Mohammad Hatta resigned in December 1956 rather than accept it. Martial law came in March 1957; the nationalisation of 246 Dutch companies and the expulsion of 40,000 Dutch nationals came that December. On 5 July 1959 Sukarno reinstated the 1945 constitution by decree, disbanded parliament in March 1960, banned Masyumi and the PSI, jailed opponents including Sjahrir, Natsir and Hamka, and in May 1963 was made president for life. His doctrines — Manipol-USDEK, Nasakom, the fusion of nationalism, religion and communism — became compulsory school subjects.

Abroad he was at his most inventive. The Bandung Conference of 1955 gathered the newly decolonised world; in Belgrade in 1961 he founded the Non-Aligned Movement with Nasser, Nehru, Tito and Nkrumah. He forced the Dutch out of West Irian, staged GANEFO as a rival Olympics in 1963, pulled Indonesia out of the United Nations in January 1965, and told Washington to go to hell with its aid.

Why Sukarno Is Called a Genius

The quality to name precisely is synthetic political imagination: the ability to compose, from mutually hostile materials, a formula each side could live with. Pancasila is the case in point. A Muslim-majority archipelago of hundreds of languages, a Hindu Bali, a Christian east, a large communist party and a Dutch-trained officer corps had no obvious reason to be one country, and Sukarno supplied the reason — abstract enough to be shared, concrete enough to be taught. It has survived him, his successor, and the fall of his successor. Add to that an oratorical gift that turned a criminal trial into national scripture, and an engineer's literal capacity to design the monuments and boulevards of the capital he was inventing.

The counter-case is severe and must be stated plainly. This is political and rhetorical genius, not administrative or economic competence, and the distinction matters: by 1965 the economy he commanded was in ruin and the country was borrowing heavily from Moscow and Beijing. Guided Democracy was not a refinement of parliamentary rule but its dismantling — a dissolved parliament, banned parties, closed newspapers, imprisoned rivals and a presidency for life. His wartime collaboration was real, and the romusha died in the hundreds of thousands. His balancing act between the army and the PKI did not hold; it collapsed into the killings of 1965–66, in which between 500,000 and over a million people died. A man who unifies a nation and then leaves it primed for slaughter has not been vindicated by history, only half-vindicated.

Afterlife

The 30 September Movement of 1965 killed seven generals, and General Suharto used the aftermath to take the state. Sukarno was stripped of power, held under house arrest, and died in Jakarta on 21 June 1970, aged 69; he is buried at Blitar beside his mother. The New Order spent three decades minimising him. After Suharto fell in 1998 the country reclaimed him: National Hero, airport, stadium, and a daughter, Megawati, who became president in her own right. Indonesians still call him Bung Karno — Brother Karno — which is a sharper verdict than any of his titles.