"State of Siege & War"

"Democracy with opposition," complained Indonesia's President Sukarno recently, "is not right for us. It is suitable for Westerners, but not for Orientals." Whether Sukarno & Co. had been practicing Western-style political democracy in their chaos-and revolt-torn young republic for the past seven years was at least a debatable point. But whatever they had tried, it was definitely not working.

When well-meaning but bumbling Premier Ali Sastroamidjojo set up his Nationalist-Moslem coalition government a year ago, after the country's first general elections, many of his countrymen (the majority of whom are illiterate) felt that they were at last within sight of the day when some semblance of law and order could be achieved. But the forces ranged against Ali--including his own incompetence--proved too great.

"Java-Centric." First of all. President Sukarno was eager for the government to take in the Communists, who held 39 seats in Parliament. Second, local politicians and military commanders all over the Indonesian string of 3,000 islands accused the government of being "Java-centric." Java, site of the capital city of Djakarta, has two-thirds of the country's population. But though Java accounts for only 17% of Indonesia's exports, it gobbles up a disproportionate slice (73%) of its imports. Sumatra, on the other hand, contributes 72% of Indonesia's exports in return for 20% of its imports. Added to these items of resentment was anger at rampant government corruption. By last week, military commanders had proclaimed a series of bloodless revolts and separatist movements that left the central government in effective control of only the island of Java and a small section of north central Sumatra.

Loyal Rebels. Last week, faced with threat of open (and quite probably bloody) civil war, Sukarno proclaimed a "state of siege and war," asked his dissident military commanders to confer with him in Djakarta. As the colonels began winging in, hapless Premier Sastroamidjojo drove up to the presidential palace on a humid tropical night and handed his chief, from a thin blue portfolio, his resignation. To try to put together another government, Sukarno named the little-known head of Sastroamidjojo's Nationalist Party, an ex-mayor of Djakarta named Suwirjo.

Later, Sukarno received his colonels at the palace, in a backslapping meeting reminiscent of a class reunion. When photographers' flashbulbs popped around Sukarno's onetime bodyguard, Lieut. Colonel Ventje Sumual, who had taken power in East Indonesia, Sumual protested in Dutch: "My God, you all think I'm a rebel! I'm not, you know." And he meant it. What Sumual and his fellow officers, rebellious but at the same time eager to be loyal, wanted was an end to corruption, to inefficiency, and to Sukarno's odd persistence in wanting Communists in the government.

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