Word: sukarno
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Megawati's father, President Sukarno, who had steered the nation to independence in 1945, was overthrown in a bloody coup in 1965. The new dictator, Suharto, was viewed by Washington as the indispensable strategic counterweight to Chinese ambitions in Asia. Today, three years after Suharto's ouster, the fate of Indonesia may be even more critical for a U.S. administration that envisages long-term strategic competition with China...
...Megawati may see herself as the nation's reluctant savior. The 54-year-old matriarch was pressed into politics at age 40 by opponents of the dictatorship who hoped to use the Sukarno mythology to rally support. And it worked. In 1999, when Indonesians had their first opportunity to vote for a successor to the ousted Suharto, Megawati won a plurality of the vote. And that despite the fact that she has few visible talents as a politician. She seldom speaks in public and rarely discusses anything approximating policy; and the fact that she allowed herself to be outmaneuvered...
...hires a prime minister to take care of. She sees for herself the more lofty role of "Mother Mega," soothing and caring for Indonesians who feel abandoned by the state. Millions of Indonesians have looked to her in precisely those terms. Now that she is their president, the Sukarno mythology won't be enough - her political survival now will depend on political skills she has not yet revealed...
...last Sultan of Serdang. Other descendants of Sultans dropped the tengku because their fathers, many of whom were allied with the colonizing Dutch, were jailed or murdered during the independence campaigns of the 1940s. Sinar's father died in 1946, but of natural causes. He had allied himself with Sukarno. A wise choice, though his family was still marched out of its home at gunpoint by communist forces. Sinar hated the communists for that. "But we got our revenge," he says a little too gleefully, when Suharto purged the communists in the 1960s following Sukarno's overthrow, leading...
...offer her the Vice Presidency as consolation two years ago. But while his equivocation on dealing with secessionist rebellions - and his decision to bow to Western pressure and decolonize East Timor - angered the generals, Megawati made common cause with them as heiress to the nationalist mantle of her father, Sukarno, who had been Indonesia's first president. Last week, Wahid sought to head off his ouster by offering to transfer most of his authority to Megawati, but the Vice President and her backers appear to have decided to go for broke: She stormed out of the cabinet meeting 15 minutes...