Word: sukarno
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...streets of the city, thousands of rioters went on a three-day rampage to protest the birth of the neighboring Federation of Malaysia, which joins Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo in a new British Commonwealth nation. With the tacit approval of Indonesia's rabble-rousing President Sukarno, who bitterly opposes the federation for the challenge it poses to his influence in Southeast Asia, the mob succeeded in presenting the fledgling nation with a full-grown diplomatic and military crisis before it was even one week...
Shattering the Façade. The riots were triggered by independence ceremonies throughout the crescent-shaped new nation. Screaming "Crush Malaysia," Sukarno's mobsters stormed the Malayan embassy in Djakarta, threw rocks through the windows, pelted the building with rotten eggs, painted anti-Malaysia slogans all over the walls. As government police stood idly by, the enraged mob then turned its fury on the British embassy in nearby Friendship Square. They ripped down sections of the iron fence around the building and shattered its modernistic glass facade under a hail of stones. The rioters tore the Union Jack from...
Back in Malaya, Sukarno's mob action stirred up retaliatory rioting. "Sukarno is a Communist bastard," howled a mob of 1,000 youths who invaded the Indonesian embassy, hoisted Malaysia's flag up the flagpole, and ripped down a heavy crest of a Garuda-a mythical bird that is Indonesia's national emblem. Escorted by motorcycle cops, the mob dragged the Garuda through the streets and onto the lawn at Abdul Rahman's official residence. There, they lifted the Tunku onto their shoulders, then lowered him so that he could put his feet on the battered...
...Singapore. Diplomatically, the Tunku got tough. He severed relations with Indonesia and with the Philippine government, which sponsored some anti-Malaysia demonstrations of its own-in support of tenuous Filipino claims to North Borneo. Then Abdul Rahman alerted the Malayan army reserve against the possibility that Sukarno might try to infiltrate Sarawak and North Borneo with guerrilla troops...
Indonesia's mob diplomacy served Sukarno well. In heating up a new crisis over Malaysia, he has created an issue to take the minds of his underfed, underemployed people off Indonesia's slide toward economic ruin and once again raised the specter of a bloody, interminable guerrilla war in the steaming thickets of Borneo. For the new nation of Malaysia, it was an ominous, inauspicious start...