Sukarno, the trained architect who proclaimed Indonesia's independence
Two days after Japan surrendered, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared an independent Indonesia on 17 August 1945. The former engineering student, jailed for over a decade by the Dutch, became the country's first president and spent four years fighting Dutch efforts to reclaim the colony before the Netherlands finally recognised the new nation in 1949.
He was born Kusno Sosrodihardjo in Surabaya on 6 June 1901, the son of a Muslim Javanese schoolteacher and a Hindu Balinese mother from the Brahmin caste. Following Javanese custom, he got a new name after surviving a childhood illness, taken from Karna, the hero of the Mahabharata. Like many Javanese, he used a single name. At a Dutch-style secondary school in Surabaya he met the nationalist Tjokroaminoto, founder of Sarekat Islam, and married his daughter. He then studied civil engineering, focusing on architecture, at the technical college in Bandung, graduating in 1926.
His spelling habits tell a small story. Sukarno insisted on writing his name with a 'u', yet kept signing it the old Dutch way, Soekarno, because after 50 years he found his signature too hard to change; Jakarta's main airport still carries that spelling. Foreign reports sometimes call him Achmed Sukarno, a first name invented by an Indonesian student in Cairo after Egyptian newspapers claimed his name was not Muslim enough. At home he was affectionately Bung Karno, Brother Karno.
A leading nationalist under Dutch rule, he was freed by the invading Japanese during the Second World War and helped rally support for their war effort in return for room to spread nationalist ideas. After independence, a turbulent spell of parliamentary democracy ended in 1959 when he imposed an authoritarian system he called Guided Democracy. Abroad he made Indonesia a loud voice of the anti-imperialist Non-Aligned Movement, drifted closer to the Soviet Union and even proposed CONEFO, a rival United Nations to be based in Jakarta.
After a failed coup attempt in 1965, General Suharto took control of the government, becoming president in 1967. Sukarno lived under house arrest until his death on 21 June 1970 and was buried beside his mother in Blitar. Suharto's regime pushed his memory aside, but interest revived as Suharto fell in 1998, and many Indonesians now honour Sukarno as their founding father.
Source: Sukarno
