Word: indonesian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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President Sukarno has never been a man who liked to take orders or even suggestions, however calm and collected the voice. From the start, he has held a mystic faith that he, and only he, speaks for the Indonesian people. "Don't you know that I am an extension of the people's tongue?" he demanded of a critic once. "The Indonesian people will eat stones if I tell them to." His charm can lay ghosts, his oratory stills critics, his famed "luck" has led him safely through imprisonment, exile, uprisings, attempted assassination and narrowly averted coups...
...Indonesians love peace as well. In the soft scented night each village resounds with the rhythmic, curiously tuneful gamelan music of bowl-shaped gongs, bamboo flutes, metal keys, two-stringed violins. Fluid-fingered dancers will hold an audience enchanted all the night long; wayang puppet shows, telling the heroic legends of the past, run from sunset to dawn. Yet together with the industriousness and mannered behavior of the Indonesian is the wild agony of the amok, when a man for no clear reason will throw off all restraint and race through his village wielding his razor-sharp parang against everything...
During the week's uproar. President Sukarno seemed the most relaxed Indonesian. In Tokyo, on the last leg of a jaunt through Asia, he went with his staff to a geisha party at the Tskuki No lye (House of the Moon) and renewed a fond acquaintance with a pretty, 29-year-old geisha named Keiko Isozaki, whom he had known during World War II in the Japanese-occupied Celebes where she was entertaining the Japanese troops and he was a Japanese supporter. Next day, Sukarno's Imperial Hotel suite had a hospital hush until late in the afternoon...
...week's end Sukarno had begun to wear a harried look, announced that he would leave for Djakarta earlier than he had expected-but only because his wife is expecting a baby. Then he went off to a luncheon party at the Indonesian consulate in Kobe, where he led his guests in singing a ballad called When We Were Young and Gay. His press officer explained: "It's his favorite song...
Sjafruddin bluntly told Sukarno that he has only two choices: "Ask for aid from Russia and other Communist countries in the fashion of Hungary's Janos Kadar ... or, if Your Excellency still loves the Indonesian Republic, return to your constitutional position and form a new Cabinet of men like Mohammed Hatta and the Sultan of Djogjakarta, who enjoy the full confidence of the majority of the Indonesian people. It is up to Your Excellency which way you wish to take...