First President of Indonesia : Sukarno

Sukarno

Sukarno was the leader of his country's struggle for independence from the Netherlands and was Indonesia's 1st president from 1945 to 1967. He was a prominent leader of Indonesia's nationalist movement during the Dutch colonial period, and spent over a decade under Dutch detention until released by the invading Japanese forces. Sukarno and his fellow nationalists collaborated to garner support for the Japanese war effort from the population, in exchange for Japanese Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945, whereby Sukarno was appointed as 1st president. Sukarno led Indonesians in resisting Dutch re-colonization efforts via diplomatic and military means until the Dutch acknowledgment of Indonesian independence in 1949.
aid in spreading nationalist ideas. Upon Japanese surrender,
After a chaotic period of parliamentary democracy, Sukarno established an autocratic system called "Guided Democracy" in 1959 which successfully ended instability and rebellions which were threatening the survival of the diverse and fractious country. The early 1960s saw Sukarno veering Indonesia to the left by providing support and protection to the Indonesian Communist Party at the expense of the military and Islamists. He also embarked on a series of aggressive foreign policies under the rubric of anti-imperialism, with aid from the Soviet Union and China. The 30 September Movement led to the destruction of PKI and his replacement by one of his generals, Suharto (see Transition to the New Order), and he remained under house arrest until his death.
The spelling "Sukarno" is frequently used in English, as it is based on the newer official spelling in Indonesia since 1947, but the older spelling Soekarno, based on Dutch orthography, is still frequently used, mainly because he signed his name in the old spelling. Official Indonesian presidential decrees from the period 1947â€"1968, however, printed his name using the 1947 spelling. The Soekarnoâ€"Hatta International Airport which serves near Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, for example, still uses the older spelling.
Indonesians also remember him as Bung Karno or Pak Karno (Mr. Karno). Like many Javanese people, he had only one name. The name Soekarno means "Good Karna" in Javanese.
The son of a Javanese primary school teacher, an aristocrat named Raden Soekemi Sosrodihardjo, and his Balinese wife from the Brahman caste named Ida Ayu Nyoman Rai from Buleleng regency, Sukarno was born at Jalan Pandean IV/40 Surabaya, East Java, in the Dutch East Indies. Following Javanese custom, he was renamed after surviving a childhood illness. After graduating from a native primary school in 1912, he was sent to Europeesche Lagere School (Dutch-primary school) in Mojokerto. When his father sent him to Surabaya in 1916 to attend a Hogere Burger School (Dutch-college preparatory school), he met Tjokroaminoto, a nationalist and founder of Sarekat Islam, the owner of the boarding house where he lived. In 1920, Sukarno married Tjokroaminoto's daughter Siti Oetari. In 1921, he began to study at the Technische Hogeschool (Bandoeng Institute of Technology) in Bandung. He studied civil engineering and focused on architecture. In Bandung, Sukarno became romantically involved with Inggit Garnasih, the wife of Sanoesi, the owner of the boarding house where he lived as student. Inggit was 13 years older than Sukarno. On March 1923, Sukarno divorced Siti Oetari to marry Inggit (who also divorced her husband Sanoesi). And later on, Sukarno divorced Inggit also and married Fatmawati.
Sukarno graduated with a degree in engineering on 25 May 1926. In July 1926, with his university friend Anwari, he established the architectural firm Sukarno & Anwari in Bandung, which provided planning and contractor services. Among Sukarno's architectural works are the renovated building of the Preanger Hotel, where he acted as assistant to famous Dutch architect Charles Prosper Wolff Schoemaker. Sukarno also designed many private houses on today's Jalan Gatot Subroto, Jalan Palasari, and Jalan Dewi Sartika in Bandung. Later on, as president, Sukarno remained engaged in architecture, designing the Proclamation Monument and adjacent Gedung Pola in Jakarta; the Youth Monument (Tugu Muda) in Semarang; the Alun-alun Monument in Malang; the Heroes' Monument in Surabaya; and also the new city of Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan.
Atypically, even among the colony's small educated elite, Sukarno was fluent in several languages. In addition to the Javanese language of his childhood, he was a master of Sundanese, Balinese and of Indonesian, and especially strong in Dutch. He was also quite comfortable in German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese, all of which were taught at his HBS. He was helped by his photographic memory and precocious mind.
In his studies, Sukarno was "intensely modern," both in architecture and in politics. He despised both the traditional Javanese feudalism, which he considered as "backward" and was to blame for the fall of the country under Dutch colonialism, and the imperialism practiced by Western countries, which he termed as "exploitation of humans by other humans" and is responsible for the deep poverty and low levels of education of Indonesian people under the Dutch. To promote nationalistic pride amongst Indonesian people, Sukarno interpreted these ideas in his dress, in his urban planning for the capital (eventually Jakarta), and in his socialist politics, though he didn't extend his taste for modern art to pop music; he had Koes Plus imprisoned for their allegedly decadent lyrics despite his reputation for womanising. For Sukarno, modernity was blind to race, neat and Western in style, and anti-imperialist.
Sukarno was 1st exposed to nationalist ideas while living under Tjokroaminoto. Later, while a student in Bandung, he immersed himself in Western, communist, and Islamic political philosophy, eventually developing his own political ideology of Indonesian-style socialist self-sufficiency. He began styling his ideas as Marhaenism, named after Marhaen, an Indonesian peasant he met in southern Bandung area, who owned his little plot of land and worked on it himself, producing sufficient income to support his family. In university, Sukarno began organising a study club for Indonesian students, the Algemeene Studieclub, in opposition to the established student clubs dominated by Dutch students.
On 4 July 1927, Sukarno with his friends from the Algemeene Studieclub established a pro-independence party, Partai Nasional Indonesia, of which Sukarno was elected the 1st leader. The party advocated independence for Indonesia, and opposed imperialism and capitalism because it opined that both systems worsened the life of Indonesian people. The party also advocated secularism and unity amongst the many different ethnicities in the Dutch East Indies, to establish a united Indonesia. Sukarno also hoped that Japan would commence a war against the western powers and that Java could then gain its independence with Japan's aid. Coming soon after the disintegration of Sarekat Islam in early 1920s and the crushing of Partai Komunis Indonesia after their failed rebellion of 1926, PNI began to attract a large number of followers, particularly among the new university-educated youths eager for larger freedoms and opportunities denied to them in the racist and constrictive political system of Dutch colonialism.
PNI activities came to the attention of the colonial government, and Sukarno's speeches and meetings was often infiltrated and disrupted by agents of the colonial secret police. Eventually, Sukarno and other key PNI leaders were arrested on 29 December 1929 by Dutch colonial authorities in a series of raids throughout Java. Sukarno himself was arrested while on a visit to Yogyakarta. During his trial at the Bandung Landraad courthouse from August to December 1930, Sukarno made a series of long political speeches attacking the injustices of colonialism and imperialism, titled Indonesia Menggoegat (Indonesia Accuses).
On December 1930, Sukarno was sentenced to four years in prison, which were served in Sukamiskin prison in Bandung. His impressive speech, however, received wide coverage by the press, and due to strong pressure from the liberal elements in both Netherlands and Dutch East Indies, Sukarno was released early on 31 December 1931. By this time, he had become a popular hero widely known throughout Indonesia.
However, during his imprisonment, PNI had been splintered by oppression of colonial authorities and internal dissension. The original PNI was disbanded by the Dutch, and its former members formed two different parties; the Partai Indonesia under Sukarno's associate Sartono who were promoting mass agitation, and the Pendidikan Nasional Indonesia (PNI Baroe) under Mohammad Hatta and Soetan Sjahrir, two nationalists who recently returned from studies in the Netherlands, and who were promoting a long-term strategy of providing modern education to the uneducated Indonesian populace to develop an intellectual elite able to offer effective resistance to Dutch rule. After attempting to reconcile the two parties to establish one united nationalist front, Sukarno chose to become the head of Partindo on 28 July 1932. Partindo had maintained its alignment with Sukarno's own strategy of immediate mass agitation, and Sukarno disagreed with Hatta's long-term cadre-based struggle. Hatta himself believed Indonesian independence would not occur within his lifetime, while Sukarno believed Hatta's strategy ignored of the fact that politics can only make real changes through formation and utilisation of force (machtsvorming en machtsaanwending).
During this period, to support himself and the party financially, Sukarno returned to architecture, opening the bureau of Soekarno & Rooseno. He also wrote articles for the party's newspaper, Fikiran Ra'jat. While based in Bandung, Sukarno travelled extensively throughout Java to establish contacts with other nationalists. His activities attracted further attention by the Dutch PID. In mid-1933, Sukarno published a series of writings titled Mentjapai Indonesia Merdeka. For this writing, he was arrested by Dutch police while visiting fellow nationalist Mohammad Hoesni Thamrin in Jakarta on 1 August 1933.
This time, to prevent providing Sukarno with a platform to make political speeches, the hardline governor-general jonkheer Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge utilised his emergency powers to send Sukarno to internal exile without trial. In 1934, Sukarno was shipped, along with his family, to the remote town of Ende, on the island of Flores. During his time in Flores, he utilised his limited freedom of movement to establish a children's theatre. Among its members was future politician Frans Seda. Due to an outbreak of malaria in Flores, the Dutch authorities decided to move Sukarno and his family to Bencoolen (now Bengkulu) on western coast of Sumatera, in February 1938.
In Bengkulu, Sukarno became acquainted with Hassan Din, the local head of Muhammadiyah organisation, and he was allowed to teach Islamic religion at a local school owned by the Muhammadiyah. One of his students was 15-year old Fatmawati, daughter of Hassan Din. He became romantically involved with Fatmawati, which he justified by stating the inability of Inggit Garnasih to produce children during their almost 20-year marriage. Sukarno was still in Bengkulu exile when the Japanese invaded the archipelago in 1942.
In early 1929, during the Indonesian National Revival, Sukarno and fellow Indonesian nationalist leader Mohammad Hatta, 1st foresaw a Pacific War and the opportunity that a Japanese advance on Indonesia might present for the Indonesian independence cause. In February 1942 Imperial Japan invaded the Dutch East Indies quickly defeating Dutch forces who marched, bussed and trucked Sukarno and his entourage three hundred kilometres from Bengkulu to Padang, Sumatra. They intended keeping him prisoner and shipping him to Australia, but abruptly abandoned him to save themselves upon the impending approach of Japanese forces on Padang.
The Japanese had their own files on Sukarno and the Japanese commander in Sumatera approached him with respect, wanting to use him to organise and pacify the Indonesians. Sukarno on the other hand wanted to use the Japanese to free Indonesia: "The Lord be praised, God showed me the way; in that valley of the Ngarai I said: Yes, Independent Indonesia can only be achieved with Dai Nippon...For the 1st time in all my life, I saw myself in the mirror of Asia." On July 1942, Sukarno was sent back to Jakarta, where he re-united with other nationalist leaders recently released by the Japanese, including Mohammad Hatta. There, he met the Japanese commander General Hitoshi Imamura, who asked Sukarno and other nationalists to galvanise support from Indonesian populace to aid Japanese war effort.
Sukarno was willing to support the Japanese, in exchange for a platform for himself to spread nationalist ideas to the mass population. The Japanese, on the other hand, needed Indonesia's manpower and natural resources to help its war effort. The Japanese recruited millions of people, particularly from Java, to be forced labor called "romusha" in Japanese. They were forced to build railways, airfields, and other facilities for the Japanese within Indonesia and as far away as Burma. Additionally, the Japanese requistioned rice and other food produced by Indonesian peasants to supply their own troops, while forcing the peasantry to cultivate castor oil plants to be used as aviation fuel and lubricants.
To gain cooperation from Indonesian population and to prevent resistance to these draconian measures, the Japanese put Sukarno as head of Tiga-A mass organisation movement. On March 1943, the Japanese formed a new organisation called Poesat Tenaga Rakjat under Sukarno, Hatta, Ki Hadjar Dewantara, and KH Mas Mansjoer. The aim of these organisations were to galvanise popular support for recruitment of romusha forced labor, requisitioning of food products, and to promote pro-Japanese and anti-Western sentiments amongst Indonesians. Sukarno coined the term, Amerika kita setrika, Inggris kita linggis ("Let's iron America, and bludgeon the British") to promote anti-Allied sentiments. In later years, Sukarno was lastingly ashamed of his role with the romusha. Additionally, food requisitioning by the Japanese caused widespread famine in Java which killed more than one million people in 1944-1945. In his view, these were necessary sacrifices to be made to allow for future independence of Indonesia. He also was involved with the formation of Pembela Tanah Air (PETA) and Heiho (Indonesian volunteer army troops) via speeches broadcast on the Japanese radio and loud speaker networks across Java and Sumatera. By mid-1945 these units numbered around two million, and were preparing to defeat any Allied forces sent to re-take Java.
In the meantime, Sukarno eventually divorced Inggit, who refused to accept her husband's wish for polygamy. She was provided with a house in Bandung and a pension for the rest of her life. In 1943, he married Fatmawati. They lived in a house in Jalan Pegangsaan Timur No. 56, confiscated from its previous Dutch owners and presented to Sukarno by the Japanese. This house would later be the venue of the Proclamation of Indonesian Independence in 1945.
On 10 November 1943 Sukarno and Hatta were sent on a seventeen-day tour of Japan, where they were decorated by the Emperor Hirohito and wined and dined in the house of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo in Tokyo. On 7 September 1944, with the war going badly for the Japanese, Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso promised independence for Indonesia, although no date was set. This announcement was seen, according to the U.S. official history, as immense vindication for Sukarno's apparent collaboration with the Japanese. The U.S. at the time considered Sukarno one of the "foremost collaborationist leaders."
On 29 April 1945, with the fall of Philippines to American hands, the Japanese allowed for the establishment of Badan Penjelidik Oesaha-oesaha Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia, a quasi-legislature consisting of 67 representatives from most ethnic-groups in Indonesia. Sukarno was appointed as head of BPUPKI and was tasked to lead discussion to prepare the basis of a future Indonesian state. To provide a common and acceptable platform to unite the various squabbling factions in BPUPKI, Sukarno formulated his ideological thinking developed for the past twenty years into five principles. On 1 June 1945, he introduced these five principles, known as pancasila, during the joint session of BPUPKI held in the former Volksraad Building (now called Gedung Pancasila).
Due to pressure from the Islamic element, the 1st principle mentioned the obligation for Muslims to practice Islamic law. However, the final Sila as contained in the 1945 Constitution which was put into effect on 18 August 1945, excluded the reference to Islamic law for sake of national unity. The elimination of sharia was done by Mohammad Hatta based upon request by Christian representative Alexander Andries Maramis, and after consultation with moderate Islamic representatives Teuku Mohammad Hassan, Kasman Singodimedjo, and Ki Bagoes Hadikoesoemo.

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