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Wherever he alights on his speaking tour around the country, a long red carpet is rolled out for him. When he finishes, the audience sings the new national anthem Indonesia Raja. The tune is almost a direct steal from Boola, Boola; the refrain starts:
Indonesia tanah airku, tanah tumpah darahku,
Disanalah dku berdiri, mendjaga pandu ibuku.
"Mister Merdeka." At the end of each speech he punches out, with clenched fists, three thunderous cheers: "Merdeka [Freedom]! Merdeka! Merdeka!" His followers roar the word, plaster it on billboards, use it as the Nazis used Heil Hitler in telephone greetings. Affectionately, they call their leader "Mister Merdeka."
He could do with a nickname. Soekarno is his first name, and it is almost as common in Java as Hans is in Holland. Indonesians are careless about surnames, and Soekarno lost his somewhere along the rocky way of a life that began humbly in Surabaya. Young Soekarno was one of those bright, indifferent students who frequently turn out to be politicians.
He set out to become an architect. At the Bandung Technical Institute he got a degree in civil engineering, which entitles him to put Ir. in front of his name (Ir. is a contraction of ingenieur, Dutch for engineer). Soekarno's architectural career was as short as his professional title. He designed a few Chinese homes and was commissioned to do a Moslem mosque (most Java mosques are hideous tin-roofed stucco monstrosities, in contrast to the lovely ruins of the vanquished Hindu temples).
Moonlight & Santayana. Soekarno gave up architecture. But though politics has been his occupation, he has not lost his interest in art. His Batavia house contains one of the finest collections of Indonesian paintings, especially moonlit mountain and jungle scenes. His favorite artist is the younger Abdullah, who painted a hauntingly lovely portrait of Soekarno's present wife (he married her because his first wife bore him no children; by the second he has a young son). When Soekarno was paid 800 guilders a month by the Japs, he used to give Artist Abdullah 100.
At an early age he read Shakespeare, Lincoln, Rousseau, John Dewey and Santayana—a mixed bag of Western thought that may have contributed to the confusion and indecisiveness that runs through his political career.
Soekarno, like thousands of other young Indonesian intellectuals, was a wavering moderate in his opposition to Dutch rule. In 1926 the Dutch made a major blunder. In suppressing a Communist uprising, they exiled 4,500 Indonesians, without trial, to New Guinea. Soekarno became an uncompromising (but nonCommunist) nationalist, reached out for power, achieved a considerable following before being exiled to Flores Island in 1934.
He was still on Flores when the Japs attacked the N.E.I. In eight days the Dutch lost Java. Gallant but inept, the Dutch Navy bungled into calamity and the Dutch air force was destroyed. Thereafter, it would have been pointless, militarily, for the Dutch Army to attempt resistance. To the Indonesians, however, the Army was the symbol of Dutch rule. When the Army did not fight and Dutch Governor General A. W. L. Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer* fled to Australia, the Indonesians lost all respect for the Dutch. Millions of Indonesians swallowed the Jap slogan "Asia for the Asiatics."