Sukarno

Sukarno was born Koesno Sosrodihardjo in Surabaya on 6 June 1901, the son of a Javanese schoolteacher and a Balinese mother. His father worked in the colonial education service, which placed the family among the small Javanese elite with access to Dutch-language schooling. He was renamed Sukarno after a childhood illness, following a Javanese practice of changing a sick child's name. The colonial caste system he encountered as a schoolboy, in which Dutch children and Javanese children were educated separately, shaped his later nationalism. He described the humiliations of that system as an early political education.

Location: Surabaya, Dutch East Indies

Sukarno completed an engineering degree at the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng, the institution later known as the Bandung Institute of Technology. In Surabaya he had lodged in the house of H. O. S. Tjokroaminoto, the leader of Sarekat Islam, and met the activists and intellectuals of the early nationalist movement there. In Bandung he joined the Study Club, a discussion group that debated independence, Marxism and Islam as competing frameworks for the colony's future. He graduated in 1926 as an *ingenieur*, a qualification that gave him standing among both Dutch-educated Indonesians and the wider public. He practised briefly as an engineer before politics absorbed him.

Location: Bandung, Dutch East Indies

On 4 July 1927 Sukarno founded the Indonesian National Party (PNI) in Bandung, the first mass-based, explicitly secular nationalist organization in the colony. The party demanded independence through non-cooperation with the colonial administration rather than through the Volksraad, the advisory council that accepted colonial rule. Sukarno developed "Marhaenism," a doctrine named for a poor Sundanese farmer he had met, which framed Indonesian nationalism in terms of the small producer against colonial capital. The PNI's rallies and its ability to draw crowds across Java alarmed the colonial government. Within two years the party claimed a mass following and had become the principal expression of the independence movement.

Location: Bandung, Dutch East Indies

Dutch colonial police arrested Sukarno on 29 December 1929, along with other PNI leaders, and charged them with plotting to overthrow the government. His trial in Bandung in 1930 became a political platform: his defence speech, published as *Indonesia Menggugat* (Indonesia Accuses), indicted colonialism in front of the court and was circulated widely in the nationalist press. He was sentenced to four years and released in 1931 after serving roughly two. Arrested again in 1933, he was exiled to Ende on Flores and then, in 1938, to Bengkulu, where he remained until the Japanese invasion. The decade of detention removed him from day-to-day politics but made him the movement's most recognized figure.

Location: Bandung, Dutch East Indies

Japanese forces completed their conquest of the Dutch East Indies in March 1942, and Sukarno was released from internment in Bengkulu. He chose to work with the occupation, arguing that Japan offered the only route to ending Dutch rule, and became chairman of Putera, the Japanese-sponsored mobilization body, and later of Jawa Hokokai. The occupation imposed the romusha system of forced labour, requisitioned rice, and produced famine and mass suffering in Java and elsewhere. Sukarno used the Japanese structures to build a nationwide network of committees and to press for Indonesian participation in government. Nationalists later debated whether this was a calculated strategy or complicity; the occupation's crimes were real either way.

Location: Bengkulu, Dutch East Indies

On 3 October 1943 the Japanese military administration announced the formation of PETA, the Defenders of the Fatherland, a volunteer force of Indonesian officers and soldiers. Sukarno and other nationalist leaders had lobbied for an Indonesian army, and the Japanese created PETA as a auxiliary force against a possible Allied landing. The force trained tens of thousands of Indonesian men in military organization, and its officers, including Suharto, became the core of the Indonesian national army after 1945. Japan's motive was military, not political, and PETA units were used in the occupation's security operations. Its unintended consequence was to give the independence movement an armed cadre.

Location: Jakarta, Japanese-occupied Indonesia

On 1 June 1945 Sukarno addressed the BPUPKI, the committee preparing for Indonesian independence under Japanese sponsorship, and proposed five principles as the philosophical basis of the state. He called them Pancasila: belief in one God, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy through consensus, and social justice. The speech was an attempt to hold together Muslim, nationalist and secular constituencies in a single framework before independence was declared. The first principle was later revised by the committee to accommodate Islamic parties, who objected to a state based on a single religious doctrine. Pancasila became the official ideology of the Indonesian state and remains inscribed in the constitution's preamble.

Location: Jakarta

Two days after Japan's surrender, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed Indonesian independence at Pegangsaan Timur 56 in Jakarta, reading a short text drafted under pressure from younger activists who had wanted a unilateral declaration. The document, typed by Sayuti Melik and signed in the name of the Indonesian people, was broadcast by radio and distributed by hand. Japanese forces were still present, Dutch authority had not returned, and no state yet existed to enforce the claim. The proclamation created the political fact on which the subsequent revolution and diplomacy rested. Sukarno was appointed president the next day by the PPKI.

Location: Jakarta

After four years of fighting, two Dutch offensives and repeated United Nations interventions, the Dutch–Indonesian Round Table Conference in The Hague ended with the transfer of sovereignty on 27 December 1949. The Dutch had captured Yogyakarta in December 1948 and imprisoned Sukarno and Hatta on Bangka, but guerrilla resistance and international pressure, including from the United States, made the occupation untenable. The agreement created the United States of Indonesia, a federation that Sukarno dissolved within a year in favour of a unitary republic. The Dutch retained West New Guinea, a dispute that poisoned relations for more than a decade. Sovereignty ended three centuries of Dutch colonial rule in the archipelago.

Location: The Hague, Netherlands

Sukarno opened the Asian-African Conference in Bandung on 18 April 1955, with delegates from 29 states representing more than half the world's population. The conference condemned colonialism and racial discrimination, called for economic cooperation, and set out the principles later adopted by the Non-Aligned Movement. Sukarno's opening address declared that a new Asia and a new Africa were being born, and he positioned Indonesia as a leader of the postcolonial world. The meeting avoided alignment with either the Soviet bloc or the Western alliance, though participants disagreed sharply on communism. It established the template for non-alignment and for later South-South diplomacy.

Location: Bandung, Indonesia

On 5 July 1959 Sukarno issued a presidential decree dissolving the Constituent Assembly, which had failed to agree on a new constitution, and restored the 1945 constitution by decree. The move ended the parliamentary system of the 1950s, which he blamed for instability, regional rebellions and cabinet turnover, and inaugurated what he called Guided Democracy. Under it, the president governed with an appointed cabinet and a consultative body, and political parties were constrained, though the Communist Party remained legal and became a partner in his NASAKOM alliance of nationalists, religion and communism. The army expanded its political role as a counterweight. The system concentrated power in Sukarno and eroded the institutions of the republic.

Location: Jakarta

In the early hours of 1 October 1965, a group of army officers calling itself the 30 September Movement abducted and killed six generals and seized part of Jakarta. The coup collapsed within a day after General Suharto, commander of the strategic reserve, mobilized loyal units and took control of the capital. The army blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) for the killings, and the allegation was broadcast and used to justify a nationwide purge. Between 500,000 and one million people were killed over the following months, according to the most commonly cited estimates, with the army and allied civilian militias carrying out the killings. The events destroyed the PKI, the largest communist party outside the Soviet bloc and China, and shifted power decisively to the army.

Location: Jakarta

On 11 March 1966, amid student protests and the collapse of his authority, Sukarno signed the order known as Supersemar, transferring executive authority to Suharto. The document's origin and wording were disputed for decades, and the original was never produced; the army's version gave Suharto wide powers to restore order. Suharto used it to ban the PKI, arrest ministers and consolidate control of the government. Sukarno remained president in name but exercised no effective power. The following year the MPRS removed him from office and placed him under house arrest, where he remained until his death in 1970.

Location: Jakarta

Sukarno died in Jakarta on 21 June 1970, at the age of 69, after years of house arrest and declining health. He was given a state funeral and buried in Blitar, East Java, and large crowds attended despite the government's restrictions on his political legacy. His daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri later became president of Indonesia, and his name remains attached to the independence era in official commemoration. The Suharto government's official history portrayed him as the founder of the nation whose later rule required correction. Debates over Guided Democracy, the 1965–66 killings and his wartime collaboration continue to shape how Indonesians assess him.

Location: Jakarta