Great Decisions 1964; 6; Sukarno: Caesar or Savior

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I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry what was the title? What was the title? One, two, three, four, three, four, five, eight, four, five, eight, five, eight, eight, seven, ten Less, ten, ten, ten Less, ten... The

Republic, Indonesia, 100 million people, fifth most populous nation in this world, one of the richest in natural resources. The man and the Republic, indivisible. Look at Sucano and you look at Indonesia today. Today, we look at President Sucano. We give you today three different views of President Sucano and his problems. From an American newspaper man with long experience in Indonesia, from a historian who specializes in Southeast Asia, and from an Indonesian, an official of his government. They widely disagree. Each has his own interpretation of the plight of this economically hard press and politically divided country. You will have to listen very

carefully in order to sort out what you consider fact from prejudice on either side. Having traveled up and down the Indonesian islands myself, I cannot emphasize too much the terrible state of disorganization in which Indonesia began its independent life. 18 years ago when Dutch rule came to an end. This explains much of the chaos that President Sucano presides over today. It explains in part also why he distracts his people with foreign quarrels in the classic manner. Why he is laying siege to Sabah and Sarawak on the island to the northward, which voted to join Malaya in the new federation called Malaysia. There is war in the air. Peace efforts are lagging. Chinese and Soviet communists wait in the wings, and the situation is very serious. What manner of man is this ruler of 100 million people? Arnold Brakman is an

American journalist with years of experience in Southeast Asia, and these are his views. President Sucano carefully cultivates his public image, the image of leader, the immaculate military uniform, the sunglasses, and the gold tip swagger stick, which to most Asians is a symbol of past colonial governors. He is never without his pitchy, the Muslim skull cap, symbol of the Indonesian nationalist movement. Sucano has been called Prophet and Playboy. Demogad and Demogad. Priest King and sawdust Caesar. What is he? How did he rise to fame? During World War I, while the Dutch overlords fought in Europe, young Sucano agitated for Indonesian independence, and end to 300 years of colonial rule. In 1929, he helped found the nationalist party,

as a result, the Dutch banished him. World War II, the Japanese invaded the East Indies, met only token Dutch resistance. Indonesian nationalism cells were split. One faction wanted to resist. Sucano, the opportunist, collaborated. He felt that somehow, Indonesia could gain independence faster from the Japanese than from the Dutch. Following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, Sucano declared Indonesian independence. A bitter four -year colonial war with the Dutch erupted. In 1949, the Dutch quit their savage battle to retain the Spice Isles. Queen Juliana signed away Holland's interests in all but West New

Guinea. Sucano was sworn in as first president of the Republic in impressive ceremonies. He began his wily game of playing faction against faction until he had politically eliminated his opponents. In 1958, he crushed a revolt against increasingly autocratic rule and emerged as the great leader of the revolution. Today, he rules from the apex of the Indonesian power pyramid. But the base of that pyramid, Brakman argues, is quick sound. Sucano eliminated virtually every force in the country, except the Army and the Communist Party. Political stability is now the delicate balance between these powerful and antagonistic forces. The Indonesian Army is a half million men. In 1960, Chris Choff visited Indonesia.

Sucano concluded a $1 billion arms pack with Moscow. By 1962, he had amassed the most powerful armed force in Southeast Asia. Today, Soviet weaponry constitutes more than three -fourths of Indonesia's military capability. The Indonesian Communist Party is two and a half million strong, and backed by more than 12 million members in labor, youth, peasant, and women's front organizations. It's the oldest Communist Party in Asia, and the largest in the world outside this Sinosoviet law. Both the Army and the Communist pledged loyalty to Sucano and his guided democracy, as the President terms his authoritarian rule. But Sucano must always keep them at bay and preoccupied. He partly achieves this because of his charismatic sway over the Indonesian people. He's a

superb orator, and partly by keeping everyone's attention fixed on international adventures. Sucano's first big adventure was his quest for control of West New Guinea, now called West Irian. The territory was the last piece of Dutch real estate in the archipelago. Responsible Indonesian leaders pleaded with the West to abandon the territory. Many Dutchmen concurred. Unable to secure West Irian by direct negotiations, or through the United Nations, Sucano turned to the Sinosoviet law for support. He initiated a brush war, forced Washington to intervene to prevent a full -scale East -West Showdown. Attorney General Robert Kennedy flew to Jakarta, and after a round of talks, the United States pressured the Dutch to give up West Irian. Mr. Brakman argues that logically, this victory should have turned Sucano's attention to internal conditions. Indonesia is caught in a whirl of ruinous inflation. This inflation has led in turn

to widespread corruption. On Java and Bali, there is hunger. The economy has almost come to a halt. The average pay of a day laborer cannot buy a decent meal. In the cities and seaports, there is labor unrest. The Communist Party has for the first time openly criticize the government for the rapidly deteriorating situation. The answer to these vexing problems, Mr. Brakman says, has been Sucano's adventures against Malaysia. Meanwhile, President Sucano makes annual jet plane trips and urges foreign leaders to visit Indonesia, person to person diplomacy. Foreign correspondents have quip that Sucano's calling card should read, have 707, will travel. And many people, including journalist Brakman,

foresee more attempts to divert the attention of the Indonesian people from their internal affairs. By this bemetaled man, whom some consider a priest king, and others call, a sawdust Caesar. Harry J. Bender is associate professor of history at Yale University and associate director of the Southeast Asia Studies program there. He disagrees with Arnold Brakman on the issue of President Sucano. It seems to me almost undeniably true that from the moment of his appearance as a political leader in the late 1920s and early 1930s in particular, there was nobody like Sucano in Indonesia that although I do not deny that there has been ample political talent, political leadership, I think he was probably the only one gifted with, and the Dutch realized this quite clearly, and his own colleagues and friends realized his loss, his removal by

the Dutch in the 30s, early 30s, as an irreparable loss. They felt literally like a beheaded kind of body. This is documented over and over again. So I think before one calls a man like Dester sawdust Caesar and tries to only survive treporation, and I think one has to see him in the context of Indonesian developments, and even the sort of things which he does, many of which you have in passing castigated to, somewhat more I think in an Indonesian context than in the purely western context, which I think you will forgive me for saying I think is what you are bringing to bear on it. Now this is I think the journalist's craft of course is against the historians. I'd like to make one clarification, I don't think that the interpretation that he may or may not be a sort of season, not necessarily, so we may be a priest king. This is not necessarily an American or western interpretation. There are many Indonesians, if not it's a basic intellectual Indonesian opinion today. Most Indonesians of course are not free to say so, and those who have or are neither in jail or under surveillance or confined

to quarters or house arrest or whatever it may be, but this is an Indonesian assessment, not necessarily a western one. That's one point. Now the other thing is as to leadership, Indonesia has been endowed with a great deal of very high caliber leadership, and it was quite evident during the revolutionary period when Sakano from all about November 45 through to the end played very much of a back role position, was used for occasional speeches, not very often at that, and the actual direction of the revolution were in the hands of about 15 or 20 men in the old, not to get technical in the old council. There was some men of really great character, great political character, with great qualities of leadership. I'm thinking of course of the chariots and the hodas and so forth, and I suppose as a rival to Sakano in terms of demagoguery that was Tan Malaka, who possibly was the only rival in demagoguery terms, but what Sakano has simply done is to apply to an impoverished, illiterate people, the same thing that a Ross Barnett or

a Forbes would do in the United States. It's simply raising a great deal of emotionalism, based emotionalism. This is a little bit, we are very much at odds, just on this particular point and the reason why we are at odds is it seems to me that you are reading of the Indonesian revolution, which is almost standard, you know they are at the standard sources written sometimes by Indonesians, mostly of course by Westerners, which you are simply repeating is to make the matter appear a little bit too neat. For sure when the war ended and Sakano stepped back on purpose, because I think he was scared for a little while, what the allies would do with him after the war, there was a little pause and there was a revolution underway, and as you know any revolution, once it goes, it has a certain momentum, it will throw up a certain kind of leadership, a revolutionary leadership. The question is what do you do when the revolution as such temporarily or comes to a halt, if you will just forgive me for saying so, in a sense you see, you might say if you want to be very nasty to the old man, that we had

Trotsky's galore, but we didn't have Stalin's galore, and I'm not trying to say that Sakano is like Stalin as a almost the opposite, we agree at least on that, but the fact of the method is you see it is the question then who can combine the necessary political skills, which are partly matters of manipulating people in the capital city, and the skills to really build a nation. I think that you are not giving adequate recognition to the fact that a nation still had to be born, and that the crucial role of Sakano in winning it about has been just colossal. I may just, I will only say one more sentence, and then let you carry again. The problem is you see that we, of course, being very anxious about the security of Indonesia, the prosperity of Indonesia, have insisted right through almost from the beginning that there ought to be a logical priority in which matters in Indonesia ought to be tackled. From that point of view, for instance, we castigated Sakano for all this drive against New Guinea. I'm

suggesting to you for just a moment to see the thing within the Indonesian framework, within the framework of the making of a new political order, and I think that the Indonesian or Sukarno's insistence on priorities which are quite reverse from ours has a certain compelling logic, and if all is said and done, you cannot deny it, Indonesia is today a more united country than she has been for a long time. Well, I have some great doubts about that, but to answer the other parts first, in terms of the record, the cabinet, the first cabinet, the Sakano cabinet was out within about two months of the revolution, and it was wholly replaced with an entirely new leadership, and the leadership that Sakano had rallied around them at the outset of the revolution was a Japanese collaborationist leadership. According to Indonesians, I think you're making this estimate that what I'm saying is a westerner, what I'm saying is what Indonesians say. Most Indonesians have opposed Sakano's priorities in terms of the, I'm going to say most Indonesians, I mean, articulate, educated, intelligent, this grouping, not necessarily western trained or whatever it may be, but

whether they were of Islamic background or whether they were of socialist or nationalist, even within the nationalist party and so forth and so on. But Indonesians themselves have felt very deeply about this, that Sakano and his sense has betrayed them and left them now at a place in history where if he goes tomorrow morning, the consequences may be terribly dire and nobody knows what the answer may be. I agree with you up to only one point and I think it is a point which is terribly important, Mr. Brackman, which has nonetheless been very frequently overlooked. Our intellectual contacts with Indonesia, particularly since, of course, the revolution, and that goes all the way, I think, from Professor Keihin, who was the pioneer really of the American mode of inquiry, right down to the most recent ones and including you and people like Mr. Hanna, have always felt most comfortable and most at home is I, quite frankly speaking, with those Indonesians who are most westernized, that does include one or two Muslims who seem to fit ill into this description, but they're chariots, they're hotter, the hotter. The people with whom one can talk

because they speak in our language, not only in English, I mean, but who share overall our political ideals. I think it is rather dangerous to say that this is Indonesia, Mr. Brackman. Really, I do. Well, I don't know what is Indonesia any more than you do, Dr. Benner, but I do feel that this is what a lot of Indonesians say. There are a lot of Indonesians. Not only a lot, but I should think the overwhelming percentage of the technology that we are trying to address one another and it's obvious. Well, I mean, just generally. Now, for example, the people that surround Sakano today like Subandrio, he's terribly western and his appearance, he's terribly glib. His command of the English language is superb, far better than ours. Subandrio, I should think, is the kind of man that we would, according to your thesis, feel very much at home with, because he's westernized and so forth. It doesn't fall. Actually, as his spokesman, as Sakano's spokesman, Bandrio is a very good example of this, of a rather resourceful opportunist and a man that I think you would find very uneasy to deal with, you know, of a prolonged period of time. Well, you see, westernization,

what I mean by westernization is not exactly what you mean by westernization. I do not simply mean the fluent command of the English, or Sakano's English, as you know, excellent is German, and it's rather a dictatorship or a representative government. Whether the westernization really goes more than skin deep, whether these people have really absorbed, not only superficially, but completely almost, completely more or less, completely absorbed, the western mode of thinking about politics, that is true of Shahriya. If you reach Shahriya's out of exile, you have difficulty remembering that this man, after all, is not a European, you see, and this I am suggesting to you have certain basic values, I think, that transcend geographical regions. Well, you shouldn't kid yourself nonetheless at what has happened over the last hundred years, has been the spreading of an Atlantic civilization over many parts of the world, and I think our fault has been to read far too much into the spreading of that civilization. So, the alternative of calling Sakano a priest king, or whatever you call him, I think well,

of course he does behave quite oddly to westerners, very frequently. No, quite oddly to Indonesians, this is something that you must be very careful about. He has four wives today, which I think most Indonesians would you agree, find offensive? So the western educated intellectuals, no, no, I do not think, I think you could go and make a head count on that, and I think you would find that probably the majority of people in Java, the population at large, would find nothing unusual about that. Don't forget that the sultans of Jocke, and the Susu Hunan of Solo, had not just four wives, but enormous establishments, you know, they had sixty -seven children sometimes, in the nineteenth century still. You see, you are making it appear, it seems to me, as if with the advent of western education, and westernization of the Indonesian elite, which was a very small group, and the Dutch kept it purposely, very small, the Indonesian past had in a sense been wiped out, and that it is only some Skaldagari on Sukarno's part to sort of revive things. That it seems to me is the

total mystery, which is a historian, I feel, we are mostly committing, that the era of decolonization is obviously throwing up too many things that we don't understand. If we apply this kind of an analysis, say, to the situation in Italy before World War II, then you could conclude that the rise of Mussolini and the fascist state were simply a revival of Roman history, because of the tradition of the seizes and so on and so on. Well, let it head to some obviously certain places. Well, one can say this then about any, the rise of any dictator at any time, since we all came out of a cave anyway. Well, you can, go back to any society to the cave. I was aware that you were going to raise this problem, and I'm in a sense quite prepared for it, and it's a difficult one to cope with. I'm not necessarily saying that understanding that this is, in a sense, a matter of continuity of Indonesia is necessarily going to be something that we approve of, but it seems to me that you are committing the other mistake of saying that nobody, but nobody, or very few people in Indonesia, feel a damn about Sukarno, that most people hate his guts, and that the man is, in a sense, a selfless sort of puppet who behaves in a grotesque fashion.

No, I would say that. There was a lot of Germanism in Hitler. The Italians love Mussolini, just the way the Indonesians love Sukarno. In a way that's all over, we will see how they love them. In a way they do, and in a way the Italians still, I think, have a certain world. They must have a secret admiration as long as he was winning. Well, partly because he was very Italian, obviously. If Sukarno can't pull off his Malaysia, from Malaysia campaign, it could conceivably, although I don't know, maybe it's premature, it could conceivably lead to some very serious internal disorder, which, in turn, could seriously affect his position as the undisputed, unrivaled leader of our time. He could, and looking just beyond, and looking just beyond her Sukarno, who, after all, is, in spite of everything mortal, you know. Some Indonesians don't think so. Well, not your friends, I think, but I think that, ultimately, this is the point I'm trying to sort of, you know, get you to at least concede to you at half, that ultimately, maybe, any post -Sukarno Indonesian political leadership, at least in the Japanese context, will probably come up with a kind of

behavior in the state of the kind of political machinery, probably not so unlike Bunkarno's. Mr. Samario is deputy permanent representative of Indonesia at the United Nations. As an official of his government, it is natural that he would disagree with Mr. Brakman. Here are some of his reasons. Mr. Samario, let me ask Mr. Brakman one thing. Don't we have the right to dig up from our own rich cultural heritage, from our Islamic religion, and also for Hindu -Buddhist mixture of religion, that great wisdom of a social system which we had, with the world and the West, has never tried to explore it. Don't we have the right to dig up our own image and put it on a national level, for a state level? Why is there a certain kind of impression or an opinion, widespread as they may be in a Western world, that new independent countries, whether they are in

Asia and Africa, should impose upon themselves the system of democracy, which you all know as Western Parliament democracy, even it may not succeed. Why should it be? We have done so with the general election, we could have labored ourselves, as we are real democracies, way back in 1956, but the same elections, which is quite a successful election, did not succeed in keving Indonesia, a stable government, a stable political life. In fact, it was very ineffective. We were the first, I would say, an under the leadership of our president. We were the first, who got the guts to say, let's see what we can do for ourselves. We are trying to put up a system, which still exists in the whole of Indonesia, among the rural population, among the less so -called politically sophisticated people, a system which still lives, still persists, the system which is quite parallel to the American system of town meeting

in New Hampshire, New England. What's wrong of applying that system on a state level? This is the whole system, what we in Indonesia are practicing. Now, there is a basic fundamental difference of views between Mr. Brakman and Mr. Pender. Mr. Brakman seems to be persistent in that Indonesia should have this system of government, which was indeed established in the early 1945 under 1957, but we pet fired into an unsuccessful end. When that was changed, he gave all the blame to the men who caused this change, President Sukarno. Mr. Bender, who was an historian, knows the perspective of history of a new country. He understood, he tried to perceive what are, in fact, the cultural values of a nation, what are the historical values of a nation, and what are the economic surroundings. These are important factors for a

new nation to build upon itself a system which is more fiable and more understandable to the masses. This is the basic mistake that Mr. Brakman unfortunately has made. Mr. Brakman talked about the election. In 1956, election of Indonesia, we had more than 50 political parties, odd political parties, of different nature. They are the socialists, they are the nationalists, they are Muslims, Catholics, Protestants and the like. Five more than 50 political parties, whereby no one of these parties had the single predominant majority in a political life of the country. One thing that that general election has accomplished is to reduce the number of those political parties into about 27 political parties. Now, I would like to ask your opinion, can a new country, with a multi -party system like this, 27 political parties, I would like to remind you, you have only two political parties over here. Can a country like Indonesia, where the masses

are still electric, where the media of communication are not perfect, where the media of information are not perfect, where there is no television, not much radio, not much electricity, not many schools, a tremendous amount of electricity. Can you guarantee that such a so -called democratic election will be really democratic? I would like to ask you this question. This is a basic problem of any newly independent countries. If you are perplexed, ladies and gentlemen, you are entitled to be, so is Indonesia perplexed, so is the United States government. The one fact which binds the whole situation together is economic. For the sake of Indonesia, we have to say that their colonial masters left them in the most hopeless economic state I have ever seen, without education or training or skill. For the sake of Indonesia's critics, we have to say that far too little has been done by the Indonesians to correct the situation. Where the country needed skills and jobs and economic development, it got political excitement, which you cannot eat. This is why United States aid goes on. Continued inflation can only produce a crack

-up in the end and only help the communists. Economic aid can perhaps, with good fortune, help keep Indonesia independent, but it's an admitted risk. The question is, do you wish to continue American aid? As for the smell of war over Malaysia, at least we can say that we lived through a similar war scare once before. But last time, when President Sukano went after West Irian on the island of New Guinea, he got it. This time the opposition is more formidable. Malaya and the British behind it and the United States probably behind the British are not prepared to yield. But there are signs that President Sukano may not press this issue to the point of war. He needs Malaysia as a strong buffer state between him and the Chinese communists. The United States for its part still wants to stand in well with President Sukano. Yet it equally wants to see Malaysia sturdily organized and on its way. Can the two aims be fitted together? The question is a good one for you and for the many study groups that the Foreign Policy Association has organized across the country to debate these great decisions. The subject for next week will be one of the most controversial issues

right now in American politics. The subject of a special message to Congress by President Johnson, the foreign aid program of the United States. This is NET, National Educational Television.