Word: sukarnoism
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Things began, dashingly enough, with a deal signed with Communist Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia for small arms, jet fighters and bombers. In Djakarta. Communist and left-wing newspapers interrupted their anti-American, anti-SEATO tirades long enough to cheer wildly President Sukarno's new link with the Reds. Bands of young toughs smeared anti-U.S. slogans on the walls of the American embassy in Djakarta; Red-run delegations streamed up the embassy steps to present resolutions telling the U.S. to keep its hands off Indonesia...
Truth was that the rebels' only chance of success was the expectation that other areas all over Indonesia would unite with them in massive opposition to President Sukarno. The other areas held back. Even Sumatra itself proved no more united as an island than Indonesia is as a country...
...Djakarta, President Sukarno made the most of the rebels' failure to rally others to their cause. The government invasion of Sumatra was not a "military" effort, he said, but a "police action against a group of political and military adventurers" who "want to drag us into one of the world blocs." From combat accounts, a police action is what it appeared...
...correspondents covering the Indonesian civil war, the main problem has been to find the war. With no defined front line in vast Sumatra-more than twice the size of Korea-most of the skirmishes between the rebels and President Sukarno's government have been as haphazard as blind man's buff...
...anything, the rebel colonels seemed to be practicing the venerable Indonesian tactic of sabar: the quality of biding time, to let the opponent make the mistakes. Unfortunately, in Western eyes, sabar is sometimes indistinguishable from paralysis. Sukarno was making mistakes, by leaning increasingly on the Communists and by straining his already weak economic position (last week the rupiah shot to an alltime high of 61 to the U.S. dollar- v. 11.4 for the official rate-on the free market). But it seemed clear that it would take more than sabar to bring him down...