Sukarno
Sukarno led Indonesia to independence and ruled it for two decades before being displaced. Born in Surabaya in 1901 to a Javanese schoolteacher and a Balinese mother, he trained as a civil engineer and was a gifted orator from his student years, fluent in Javanese, Dutch, English, German and Japanese. He founded the Indonesian National Party in 1927, was arrested by the Dutch in 1929, and spent most of the following decade in prison or internal exile. The Japanese released him in 1942 and used him; he cooperated, which secured him a platform and mass organisation and involved him in the recruitment of forced labourers, of whom very large numbers died. On 17 August 1945, days after the Japanese surrender, he declared independence. The Netherlands fought for four years to reverse it and conceded in December 1949 under international pressure. His ideology was Pancasila — five principles including belief in one God, national unity and social justice — designed to hold together a country of thousands of islands and hundreds of languages. He convened the Bandung Conference in 1955, which launched the non-aligned movement. Parliamentary democracy produced instability, and from 1957 he imposed Guided Democracy, dissolving the assembly and balancing the army against the Communist Party, which became the largest outside the communist bloc. The economy collapsed with inflation above six hundred per cent. After the killing of six generals in September 1965, Suharto destroyed the Communist Party in massacres that killed hundreds of thousands, and progressively stripped Sukarno of power. He died under house arrest in 1970.
- Lived: 1901 CE – 1970 CE
- Nationality: Indonesian
- Roles: head_of_state, revolutionary, statesman
