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Indonesia last week seemed on the brink of running amok. No one could say which of the nation's characteristics would triumph: that of halus, the ability to adjust passively to circumstances and thereby dominate them, or that of kasar, the blind, rough, uncivilized plunge into brutal action. If the decision rests with anyone, it is with President Sukarno, who, at 56, moves with deceptive lightness through domestic crises and international power plays. His mind and personality are quicksilver; there is a nowhere, now-there quality to his thinking and actions that bewilders his friends and enrages his foes. A Dutch negotiator, after too long an exposure to Sukarno, cried in bafflement: "He is utterly unreliable, one day a fascist, the next a Communist; one day a friend of the white man, the next a violent enemy." No one admires such diversity more than Sukarno himself. On his s6th birthday last year, he told a crowd of well-wishers: "I was born under the sign of Gemini, and I am destined to live a double life according to astrologers. I am a Marxist but I love religion. I am a scientist but I am also an artist.
Some-times I'm serious, sometimes I horse around. I can mix with Communists and Socialists, Moslems and Christians, revolutionary nationalists and compromising nationalists.
Without the Indonesian people I'd be nothing but an ordinary person. It's only in the name of the people that I am an occupant of palaces at Merdeka and Negara, Bogor and Tjirpani."
Most of all, Sukarno wants to be loved and admired. He is happy when surrounded by schoolchildren; it delights him to keep statesmen waiting while he listens patiently to a ragged old woman's complaint. He likes the traditional things of his national life, from Indonesian painting to puppet shows to dukuns (soothsayers). His favorite dukun, a ripe female named Madame Suprapto, last week offered him a particularly explicit prophecy: "The first big bomb will fall in Indonesia in March. The United States will intervene in the struggle between Padang and Djakarta, then the Soviet Union will intervene in turn, and World War III will be under way." The result: the U.S., the Soviet Union and all of Europe will be destroyed, and Red China will emerge as the world's foremost power. Indonesia, the forecast concludes, "will play a major part in the reconstruction of Asia." Sukarno reportedly pays as much attention to Madame Suprapto as he does to most political advisers.
Backward Teachers. Sukarno was born in a small village about 60 miles from the seaport city of Surabaja in 1901, the only son of an impoverished Javanese schoolteacher named Sukemi* and a high-caste Balinese mother, Ida Njoman Rai.
From his father, Sukarno learned the Moslem faith and the seeds of nationalism; from his mother, the long cycle of Hindu epics that have sustained Bali in its centuries-old resistance to the Mohammedanism of the surrounding islands.
The combination left him securely dedicated to no faith. As a member of the priyayi, or gentry, the class that monopolized the few bureaucratic jobs left open by the Dutch to natives, he was socially far above the marhaen, or peasants, who were to become his most ardent followers.