After junketing around the world for 64 days, Indonesia’s President Sukarno finally returned to his land of customary turmoil last week. On his swing through 18 nations, he had picked up five honorary degrees, nine decorations and still another shapely airline hostess to go nightclubbing with: a 22-year-old Hawaiian beauty queen named Carol Ah You, who works for Great Lakes Air Lines and accompanied the President from San Francisco to Hawaii. Said Bung Karno, step ping off a charted Pan American DC-6B still staffed by favorite stewardess No. i, 25-year-old Joan Sweeney: “This has been much more successful than my earlier trips.” But the old place was not much fun to come home to. Rebel and bandit fighting continued in Java, Sumatra, the Celebes and Borneo. The monetary reform so ambitiously decreed last year was a total failure. With more currency
in circulation than ever, the rupiah was down to 250 to the dollar on the free market (official rate 45 to one), and the presses still clacked out new money to support a 250,000-man army that gobbles up 50% of the budget. Commerce had slowed to a near standstill; in central Java only 50 sugar mills were operating (v. 120 prewar), and some 200,000 mill workers were unemployed. Everywhere, there was graft, red tape and spectacular inefficiency. Shiny new Czech tractors proved useless in the flooded rice fields; some 30% of a 100,000-ton Swedish shipment of cement had turned to rock because no one thought to bring it in out of the rain.
In the past Sukarno has always been able to push ahead as he liked with his “guided democracy,” because his opponents were hopelessly fragmented among some 27 different parties. But Sukarno came home to find many of his old opponents united for the first time. Formed by members of the old elected Parliament that Sukarno dismissed last March and replaced with a hand-picked legislature of his own choosing, the new anti-Communist opposition calls itself the Democratic League, unites Muslims, Catholics, Protestants and splinter parties behind one idea: the necessity for radical changes in Sukarno’s one-man rule.
In three months the league has mushroomed into 60 chapters throughout the archipelago, plans to present Sukarno with a petition of several hundred thousand signatures demanding reinstatement of the elected Parliament.
Whether or not the league becomes a force depends largely on the army and its strongman army chief of staff, General Abdul Haris Nasution, 41. Though Nasution has consistently supported Sukarno, one of the league’s charter parties is the Indonesian Independence Upholders Union, formed several years ago by General Nasution himself. Significantly, military commanders in most areas have allowed the league to recruit members and hold meetings.
Shortly after his return last week, Sukarno had lunch and a long talk with General Nasution. emerged conceding that the new Parliament needed “some improvements” before it was installed later this month. Exactly what the improvements would be, Sukarno did not say. But the word was that he would distribute another 25 seats, so that the Communists, now commanding about 60 of 261 proposed seats, would not loom quite so large.
With that, the man who describes himself as “the voice of the Indonesian people” got set to leave his troubled capital once more, this time for a sojourn at the government guest house at Tampaksiring in Bali. It was not just another holiday, said Sukarno; he was also “going for the settlement of some important work.”
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