Kusno Sosrodihardjo — later Sukarno — was born on 6 June 1901 in Surabaya, Java, the son of a Javanese schoolteacher and a Balinese mother of aristocratic Hindu descent. He showed such early intellectual brilliance that his father arranged for him to board with Haji Omar Said Tjokroaminoto, leader of the first mass Indonesian nationalist movement, Sarekat Islam. Sukarno absorbed nationalism like oxygen. He studied civil engineering at the Bandung Institute of Technology, graduating in 1926, and immediately turned his technical mind to the architecture of a free Indonesia. In 1927 he founded the Indonesian National Party (PNI), which the Dutch colonial authorities banned and dissolved in 1931 after arresting him. He was exiled twice by the Dutch — to Flores in 1933 and then to Bengkulu in Sumatra in 1938 — but emerged from each exile more famous than before. When Japan invaded in 1942 and swept the Dutch out, Sukarno chose to collaborate with the occupiers, mobilizing Indonesian labor for the Japanese war effort in exchange for Japanese support for his nationalist agenda. On 17 August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender, Sukarno and his colleague Mohammad Hatta read the proclamation of Indonesian independence at 10 a.m. at Sukarno's house on Jalan Pegangsaan Timur 56 in Jakarta — a brief, plain statement typed on a scrap of paper. The text was: We the people of Indonesia hereby declare Indonesia's independence. Matters concerning the transfer of power and other matters will be executed in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time. Four years of revolution followed as Dutch forces attempted to retake the archipelago; international pressure and UN intervention forced a Dutch recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in December 1949. Sukarno was elected first president. He confronted a country with 17,000 islands, 300 ethnic groups, hundreds of languages, and a literacy rate under ten percent. His answer was Pancasila — five founding principles: belief in one God, just and civilized humanity, the unity of Indonesia, democracy guided by deliberation, and social justice. In April 1955 he convened the Bandung Conference, bringing together twenty-nine nations from Africa and Asia — representing 1.5 billion people, more than half of humanity — to chart a course independent of both Washington and Moscow. It was the founding moment of the Non-Aligned Movement and of the postcolonial world order. At home, his system called Guided Democracy concentrated power in his hands, and by the early 1960s he was balancing an increasingly dangerous triangle: the army, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI, the world's third-largest), and himself. On the night of 30 September 1965 a group of military officers killed six senior generals in Jakarta; the army, led by General Suharto, blamed the PKI and launched a massacre in which an estimated 500,000 to one million people were killed. Sukarno was sidelined progressively through 1966 and formally stripped of power in March 1967. He spent his final years under house arrest in the Presidential Guest House at Bogor, denied proper medical treatment, dying of kidney failure on 21 June 1970.
All Figures
First President of Indonesia · Founder of the Non-Aligned Movement · Architect of Indonesian Independence
Sukarno
1,901 CE – 1,970 CE
The engineer-turned-orator who proclaimed Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945, bound 17,000 islands and three hundred ethnic groups into one republic, and then steered the whole Cold War world from Bandung in 1955.
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