Word: sukarno
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Guarding the Strong Room. The crisis was triggered by Indonesia's puffy, demagogic President Sukarno, who has sworn to crush Malaysia at all costs. On the Sarawak frontier, an Indonesian mortar company lobbed shells across the border. Deepening Indonesia's quarrel with Britain, which is pledged to defend Malaysia, government troops in Djakarta barred British diplomats from entering their embassy, gutted fortnight ago by an unchecked mob. The guards even tried to break into the embassy's fireproof code room until they were stopped by tough, stocky Ambassador Andrew Gilchrist, who forced his way into the embassy...
...flurry of edicts, Sukarno cut off all phone, telegraph, postal, airline and shipping links with Malaysia and abruptly halted all Indonesian trade with the federation. The trade embargo was childishly spiteful and totally without logic, for it would do far more damage to Indonesia than to Malaysia. Over 52% of Indonesia's total annual ex ports of $674 million is to the federation, and most of Indonesia's shipping is funneled through Singapore and Penang. Only Singapore has the facilities to process the low grades that make up much of Indonesia's rubber crop...
Indonesia seems doomed to military failure or, at best, a very limited guerrilla success. Meanwhile, by severing trade relations with Malaysia, Sukarno has invited economic failure. More than half of Indonesia's rubber, which supplies 50 per cent of the nation's foreign exchange income, was formerly processed at Singapore. Indonesian tin will have to be refined in Europe, instead of Penang. And Indonesia's refined oil products, over 60 per cent of which went to Malaya and Singapore in the first half of 1963, will have to find new markets. Indonesia will also forfeit $300 million in proposed American...
...cent. Foreign exchange holdings have declined 75 per cent since 1958. The Indonesian rupiah, which was devalued by 75 per cent in 1960, dropped in May of this year to four per cent of its pre-1960 figure. Rice, Indonesia's staple food, is expensive and scarce, Sukarno will probably have to import over 75 million dollars worth of rice this year, and he will have to sell enough exports...
...diplomacy has left him without markets for some 27 per cent of his exports. There seems little doubt which way be will turn. Having found a new set of enemies, he has no need of old ones. Sukarno, the virulent anti-colonialist, the man who fought the Dutch so bitterly for thirty years, will almost certainly seek his new markets in Holland...