Sukarno

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sukarno was born Koesno Sosrodihardjo on the 6th of June 1901, in Surabaya, East Java, the son of a Muslim Javanese primary school teacher and a Hindu Balinese mother from the Brahmin caste. By the time he died on the 21st of June 1970, he had declared a nation's independence, resisted two military invasions, addressed a joint session of the United States Congress, laughed off a blackmail attempt by the KGB, and been stripped of the power he spent his entire life assembling.

  His name came from Karna, the mythological chief hero of the Mahabharata. The Dutch spelled it Soekarno, and he still signed it that way himself, even after insisting for decades that the correct spelling used a "u." He told people he had been taught the Dutch style in school and that after fifty years it was simply too difficult to change his signature. That gap between what Sukarno believed and what circumstances forced him to accept runs straight through his entire life.

  How did a boy from colonial Surabaya become the founding father of the world's largest archipelago nation? What forced him to collaborate with one occupying power to free his country from another? And how did the man who gave Indonesia its founding philosophy end up dying under house arrest in the very country he created? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Making of a Nationalist

  ›

  At the Hogere Burgerschool in Surabaya, which Sukarno entered in 1916, he met Tjokroaminoto, the founder of Sarekat Islam, and moved into his house. That encounter planted the seed of a political life. By 1921, when he began studying civil engineering at the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng, his intellectual appetite had broadened to encompass European, American, nationalist, communist, and religious philosophy all at once.

  Sukarno called the resulting synthesis Marhaenism. The name came from Marhaen, an Indonesian peasant he encountered in the southern Bandung area who owned his small plot of land, worked it himself, and earned just enough to support his family. For Sukarno, Marhaen represented the typical Indonesian: not a proletarian in the Marxist sense, since he owned his means of production, but crushed by the double weight of colonialism and poverty. Sukarno was building an ideology for that man, not for factory workers in European cities.

  At university he organized the Algemeene Studieclub for Indonesian students, deliberately positioning it against the Dutch-dominated student clubs on campus. Then, on the 4th of July 1927, he and his friends from the Studieclub founded the Indonesian National Party, the PNI, and elected Sukarno its first leader. The party called for independence, opposed imperialism and capitalism, and championed both secularism and unity across the many ethnic groups of the Dutch East Indies.

  Fluent in Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Indonesian, Dutch, German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese, Sukarno was, as his own contemporaries noted, "intensely modern" in both architecture and politics. He despised traditional Javanese feudalism, which he considered backward and partly responsible for Dutch domination, and he attacked Western imperialism as what he called "exploitation of humans by other humans" - in French, exploitation de l'homme par l'homme. Both enemies, in his view, had conspired to produce the deep poverty and low education he saw all around him.

• 3. Trial, Prison, and Exile

  ›

  On the 29th of December 1929, Dutch colonial police arrested Sukarno and other PNI leaders in a series of raids throughout Java. Sukarno himself was taken while visiting Yogyakarta. The Dutch colonial government had been watching for months; its political intelligence service, the Politieke Inlichtingendienst, had been infiltrating his speeches and meetings.

  At the Bandung Landraad courthouse, from August to December 1930, Sukarno turned his own trial into a political platform. His series of long speeches attacking colonialism were collected under the title Indonesia Menggoegat, Indonesia Accuses. The press covered them extensively. The liberal wing in both the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies pushed back against the sentence, and governor-general Andries Cornelis Dirk de Graeff cut Sukarno's four-year prison term to two years. He walked out of Sukamiskin prison in Bandung on the 31st of December 1931, already a popular hero known across the archipelago.

  He was arrested again in 1933, this time while visiting fellow nationalist Mohammad Hoesni Thamrin in Jakarta. The hardline governor-general, Jonkheer Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge, was determined not to give Sukarno another courtroom podium. He used emergency powers to bypass a trial entirely and send Sukarno to internal exile, first to the remote island of Flores in 1934, then to Bencoolen on the western coast of Sumatra in February 1938.

  In Bengkulu, as Bencoolen was now called, Sukarno found a measure of freedom. He taught religious lessons at a school run by the Muhammadiyah organization, whose local head, Hassan Din, had welcomed him. One of his students was Hassan Din's fifteen-year-old daughter, Fatmawati. She would later become his wife. He was still in Bengkulu when the Japanese swept through the archipelago in 1942, and his period of colonial exile came to an abrupt end.

• 4. The Japanese Bargain

  ›

  As early as 1929, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta had foreseen the possibility of a Pacific War and what it might mean for Indonesian independence. When Imperial Japan invaded the Dutch East Indies on the 10th of January 1942, the Dutch marched Sukarno three hundred kilometres from Bengkulu to Padang, intending to ship him to Australia as a prisoner. They abandoned him there when Japanese forces approached.

  The Japanese commander in Sumatra came to Sukarno with respect, not as a conqueror dealing with a subject. Japan wanted him to organize and pacify the Indonesian population. Sukarno saw it from the other direction entirely. As he said at the time: "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 first time in all my life, I saw myself in the mirror of Asia."

  In July 1942, he was sent to Jakarta, where he met Japanese commander General Hitoshi Imamura. The arrangement that followed was transactional on both sides. Sukarno would galvanise popular support for Japan's war effort; in return he would have a platform to spread nationalist ideas to the mass population. Japan, for its part, needed Indonesia's workforce and natural resources.

  The practical consequences for ordinary Indonesians were severe. The Japanese recruited millions, mainly from Java, as forced labourers called romusha, sending them to build railways and airfields inside Indonesia and as far away as Burma. They requisitioned rice from peasants while forcing them to grow castor oil plants for aviation fuel. Sukarno was placed at the head of the Tiga-A propaganda movement and later the POETERA organization, alongside Hatta, Ki Hadjar Dewantara, and KH Mas Mansjoer, all aimed at generating compliance with these demands. He coined the slogan Amerika kita setrika, Inggris kita linggis - let's iron America, and bludgeon the British. In later years he carried lasting shame about his role in the romusha system. More than one million people died in a Japanese-caused famine in Java in 1944-1945.

  On the 10th of November 1943, Sukarno and Hatta flew to Japan on a seventeen-day tour, were decorated by Emperor Hirohito, and dined at the home of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo in Tokyo. Then, on the 7th of September 1944, Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso promised Indonesian independence, though without naming a date. American official history described this as immense vindication for Sukarno's approach; the Americans at that point regarded him as one of the foremost collaborationist leaders.

• 5. The Proclamation and the Revolution

  ›

  On the morning of the 15th of August 1945, youth leaders Chairul Saleh, Soekarni, and Wikana told Sukarno that Japan had accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered. They urged him to declare independence immediately. Sukarno hesitated. He feared a Japanese reaction and future Allied retribution.

  In the early hours of the 16th of August, the three youth leaders ran out of patience. They took Sukarno from his house by force and drove him to a small house in Rengasdengklok, Karawang, owned by a Chinese family and occupied by the PETA militia. There they extracted his commitment to declare independence the following day. That night they brought him to the home of Admiral Tadashi Maeda, the Japanese naval liaison officer in the Menteng area of Jakarta, who was sympathetic to Indonesian independence. Sukarno and his assistant Sajoeti Melik drafted the text of the Proclamation there.

  At 10 in the morning on the 17th of August 1945, Sukarno stepped to the front porch of his house at Jalan Pegangsaan Timur No. 56 and read the Proclamation of Indonesian Independence to a crowd of five hundred people. The house would later be demolished on Sukarno's own orders, for reasons he never explained publicly.

  The Dutch returned, first as administrators and then as soldiers, under the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration. What followed was four years of armed and diplomatic struggle. The British landed the 1st Battalion of Seaforth Highlanders in Jakarta in late September 1945. Full battle broke out in Surabaya on the 10th of November between the 49th Infantry Brigade of the British Indian Army and Indonesian nationalist militias; several hundred Indian soldiers were killed, including their commander Brigadier Aubertin Walter Sothern Mallaby, along with thousands of Indonesian fighters.

  Sukarno moved the republican government to Yogyakarta on the 4th of January 1946, under the protection of Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX. The city would serve as the Republic's capital until 1949. International pressure and guerrilla resistance gradually wore down the Dutch position. The decisive moment came after the second Dutch invasion in December 1948, called Operation Kraai. The United States threatened to cut Marshall Aid to the Netherlands if operations continued. Lieutenant Colonel Suharto led the republican assault on Dutch-held Yogyakarta on the 1st of March 1949. The Dutch signed the Roem-Van Roijen Agreement on the 7th of May 1949. On the 27th of December 1949, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands transferred complete sovereignty to Indonesia.

• 6. Pancasila and the Idea of Indonesia

  ›

  On the 1st of June 1945, in the former Volksraad Building in Jakarta, Sukarno stood before the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for Independence and laid out five principles he believed all Indonesians shared. He called them pancasila.

  The five principles were: nationalism, meaning a united Indonesian state stretching from Sabang to Merauke; internationalism, meaning respect for human rights and contribution to world peace; democracy, rooted in the indigenous practice of consensus-seeking called musyawarah; social justice, a populist socialism opposed to the economic domination that the Dutch and Chinese had maintained through the colonial period; and belief in God, with equal treatment for all religions.

  Sukarno insisted on a critical distinction. Indonesian democracy, he argued, had always worked through deliberation aimed at consensus, guided by village elders. That was fundamentally different from Western-style liberal democracy, which he considered unsuited to Indonesia's conditions. The phrase he used to capture the spirit of all five principles together was gotong royong, the Indonesian concept of mutual cooperation.

  The principles faced immediate political pressure. The Islamic elements in the committee wanted the first principle to require Muslims to observe sharia. A compromise document called the Jakarta Charter included that obligation. But when the final 1945 Constitution was adopted on the 18th of August 1945, the sharia reference was removed. Mohammad Hatta made the change after a request from Christian representative Alexander Andries Maramis, and following consultation with moderate Islamic representatives Teuku Mohammad Hassan, Kasman Singodimedjo, and Ki Bagoes Hadikoesoemo. The resulting secular constitutional foundation held, though it remained contested for decades. The tension between Islamic law and national unity would fuel rebellions in West Java, South Sulawesi, and Aceh well into the 1960s.

• 7. Guided Democracy and the World Stage

  ›

  In 1955, Sukarno organized the Bandung Conference, bringing together developing Asian and African countries to establish what would become the Non-Aligned Movement. That same year's elections produced a parliament where four major parties - the PNI, Masyumi, Nahdlatul Ulama, and PKI - split the vote so evenly that no governing majority was possible. Sukarno grew impatient with the deadlock.

  On the 5th of July 1959, he reinstated the 1945 constitution by presidential decree, establishing presidential rule. He called the system Guided Democracy, claiming it was grounded in indigenous Indonesian practices rather than Western liberalism. By March 1960 he had disbanded parliament and replaced it with one in which he appointed half the members himself. On the 18th of May 1963, the Provisional People's Consultative Assembly elected him president for life.

  His ideological writings became mandatory study in schools and universities. Both the sole radio station, RRI, and the sole television station, TVRI, functioned as tools of the revolution. The capital of newly acquired West Irian was renamed Sukarnapura, and the country's highest peak was renamed Puntjak Sukarno.

  On the world stage, Sukarno was a genuine figure of consequence. In 1956 he addressed a joint session of the United States Congress, the only Indonesian president to have done so as of 2025. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev paid a return visit to Jakarta and Bali in 1960 and awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1961, Sukarno helped found the Non-Aligned Movement at its first summit in Belgrade alongside Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah. His name became a street name in Cairo and Rabat, and lent itself to a major square in Peshawar. The University of Belgrade awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1956.

  Both the CIA and the KGB tried to blackmail him with sex tapes. The KGB allegedly filmed him with women during Moscow visits around 1960. Sukarno laughed off the attempt and asked for copies of the recordings. The CIA produced a fake pornographic film featuring a Sukarno look-alike, which they claimed had been made by the KGB. Neither operation succeeded. Indonesians saw Sukarno as a tough figure, and he held his non-aligned course.

  By January 1965, he had withdrawn Indonesia entirely from the United Nations when, with American backing, Malaysia took a seat on the Security Council. His response to US pressure over aid was the remark he became famous for: "Go to hell with your aid." He was planning CONEFO, a rival world organisation to the UN to be headquartered in Jakarta, backed by China, which was itself not yet a UN member.

• 8. Fall, Silence, and Legacy

  ›

  By 1965, the PKI had three million members, making it the strongest party in Indonesia, and it was particularly powerful in Central Java and Bali. The military, nationalists, and Islamic groups watched its growth with alarm. On the night of the 30th of September 1965, a coup attempt attributed to senior PKI leaders upended everything. General Suharto moved quickly, taking control of the government in a military takeover.

  What followed was one of the largest mass killings of the twentieth century. Between 500,000 and over one million people were killed in purges targeting members and suspected supporters of the PKI. Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States and the United Kingdom, backed the campaign. Sukarno was progressively stripped of authority. Suharto officially became president in 1967. Sukarno was placed under house arrest.

  He died on the 21st of June 1970, and was buried in Blitar, East Java, next to his mother. During the early years of Suharto's New Order government, Sukarno's role in Indonesia's independence was actively minimized, and his name was largely removed from public discourse. The man who had organized the Bandung Conference, declared independence before a crowd of five hundred people, and coined the phrase gotong royong as the distillation of the national identity was treated as an embarrassment by those who had displaced him.

  When Suharto himself fell in 1998, public interest in Sukarno revived alongside the democratic reforms that followed. The airport serving Jakarta still carries the name Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, the Dutch spelling he could never bring himself to change in his own signature. His full title, Bapak Proklamator - Father of Proclamation - points back to that morning of the 17th of August 1945, and to the porch at Jalan Pegangsaan Timur No. 56 where he stood before five hundred people and named a nation into existence.