Word: merdeka
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When revolt struck Djakarta last week, it seemed appropriate that President Sukarno was in the company of a lovely woman. He was with Morning Star, his most recent wife, a 26-year-old former Japanese bar hostess. Sukarno had left Merdeka Palace to visit her brown-walled bungalow for dinner beneath dozens of Indonesian statues. As the meal ended, word came of a military uprising in the city. Dismissing his motorcade, Sukarno summoned a helicopter and was lifted up into the night sky-and for four days, the flamboyant, hard-living leader of a nation of 104 million...
President Sukarno's Anniversary Day speeches are usually something to behold. His head bobbing furiously, a finger jabbing at the sky, he loves wild histrionics that send crowds into chanting, clapping frenzies. But last week as 60,000 gathered before the canopied platform at Merdeka Palace, Indonesia's ruler put on a strangely muted, flat and unspirited show. He called his speech "Reach for the Stars," but it did not get off the ground...
...contact with the Malayan independence movement that began to take root when the Japanese ousted the British. With the end of the war, at the age of 42, the Tunku returned to England to get his law degree, began to play a larger part in the cause of merdeka (freedom). He insisted that it was the duty of every Malay in Britain to join the nationalistic Malay Society. Because of his age and long experience in the civil service, younger Malay students looked to him as their leader, called him-because of his darker skin-"Black Uncle." In fiery political...
...Merdeka. Abdul Rahman was so busy politicking that he had taken little military interest in the brutal, bloody guerrilla war that 350,000 British and Malayan troops and home guardsmen were waging against Communist insurgents in Malaya's tangled jungles. But after his 1955 election landslide, the Tunku grew afraid that the British might use the emergency to delay independence, arranged to meet the Communist rebel chieftains in northern Malaya to see if some sort of settlement could be worked out. "My ideas about Communism were determined by that meeting," says the Tunku. "I became convinced that once...
Currently under construction in Djakarta is the Merdeka (Freedom) Mosque, which is to be the world's biggest. The diameter of Merdeka's cupola will be 147 ft., or 40 ft. wider than the cupola of Istanbul's Hagia Sophia. Merdeka will hold 100,000 worshipers, twice the capacity of Lahore's Shah Badi Mosque. Since unbalancing the budget is also something Sukarno does big, part of the mosque's $30 million cost is being raised by more or less forced public subscription...