Sukarno

Indonesia's founding president led the nationalist movement against Dutch rule, proclaimed the country's independence in August 1945 and governed it until he was eased out of power by the army in 1966–67. A gifted orator and the author of the state philosophy of Pancasila, Sukarno later ruled through an authoritarian "Guided Democracy" and became a leading voice of the non-aligned world. His rule ended amid an alleged communist coup attempt and the mass killings that followed it.

Sukarno was born on 6 June 1901 in Surabaya, in the Dutch East Indies, to a Javanese schoolteacher and a Balinese mother. As a schoolboy in Surabaya he lodged with the nationalist leader Tjokroaminoto and later qualified as an engineer in Bandung in 1926. In 1927 he founded the Indonesian National Party, which demanded independence. Arrested in 1929, he used his trial to deliver a celebrated indictment of colonialism, served about two years in prison, and from 1933 was held in internal exile on Flores and then in Bengkulu, Sumatra.

When Japan invaded in 1942, Sukarno chose to work with the occupiers as a route to independence. He headed Japanese-sponsored mass organisations that helped recruit forced labourers, the romusha, and gather food for the occupation; he later expressed lasting shame over the forced labour. In June 1945 he set out the five principles of Pancasila, which became the foundation of the state.

After Japan surrendered, young radicals pressed him to act, and on 17 August 1945 Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed independence; the next day he was chosen as president. The Dutch tried to restore their rule, beginning four years of fighting and negotiation known as the Indonesian National Revolution. In December 1948 Dutch forces captured Sukarno and other leaders in Yogyakarta, but guerrilla resistance and American pressure forced the Netherlands to transfer sovereignty on 27 December 1949.

Parliamentary government in the 1950s was unstable, with short-lived cabinets and regional rebellions, some backed by the CIA. Sukarno declared martial law in 1957, nationalised Dutch companies, and in July 1959 restored the 1945 constitution by decree, ruling through what he called Guided Democracy. Parliament was replaced by a largely appointed body, opposition parties were banned, critics jailed and newspapers closed, and in 1963 he was made president for life. He balanced the army against the fast-growing Communist Party (PKI).

Sukarno hosted the Bandung Conference of Asian and African states in 1955 and helped found the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. He pressed Indonesia's claim to Dutch-held western New Guinea, which passed to Indonesian control in 1963, and then waged a campaign of confrontation against the new federation of Malaysia. In January 1965 he withdrew Indonesia from the United Nations and drew closer to China. Meanwhile the economy collapsed, with inflation above 600 per cent a year in 1964–65.

On 1 October 1965 a group calling itself the 30 September Movement killed six senior generals. The army under General Suharto crushed it within days and blamed the PKI; the extent of communist involvement, and Sukarno's own role, remain disputed. In the purge that followed, the army and allied militias killed, by the most widely accepted estimates, at least half a million people, in the mass killings of 1965–66, a purge that Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States and Britain, are reported to have supported. On 11 March 1966 Sukarno signed an order, the Supersemar, transferring broad authority to Suharto; whether he signed under duress is debated. He lost his remaining powers in 1967.

Kept under house arrest, Sukarno was reportedly denied adequate medical care and died of kidney failure on 21 June 1970. He was buried in Blitar, East Java. Sidelined under Suharto's New Order, his reputation revived after 1998, and in 2024 Indonesia's highest assembly revoked the 1967 decree that had removed him, noting he had never been tried.

Our 1938 map shows the Dutch colony before independence, and the 1960 map shows the Republic of Indonesia during Guided Democracy.