Indonesia: The Bamboo Bomb

In Geneva during his recent European tour, Indonesia’s President Sukarno slipped into an out-of-the-way cinema for an evening’s relaxation after a hard day of negotiations with pretty shopgirls and Swiss arms manufacturers. No doubt the “Bung” (Brother), an old movie buff, needed a bit of tranquilizing, but the feature film proved to be The Fall of the Roman Empire. In light of what has been happening in Indonesia of late, it must have scanned like a sneak preview.

Rats & Sweet Potatoes. Most disastrous of Sukarno’s programs has been his attempt to “crush Malaysia.” The neighboring nation has proved as undentable as armor plate: of 256 Indonesian-trained saboteurs, terrorists and guerrillas landed over the past three months, 47 were killed and 187 captured. Last week, when Sukarno issued his customary order to “intensify” the campaign, 20 more guerrillas sailed off by sampan to Malaya and Singapore —and were soon being hotly pursued by alert British-led troops and citizens, who can collect $300 for every interloper captured. Still, Indonesia’s flourishing Communist Party (3,000,000 members) insists that Malaysia must be crushed and last week added to Sukarno’s troubles by inaugurating an equally absurd “crush American imperialism” drive on the pretext that the U.S. had sent a military-aid mission to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.

Economically, Indonesia’s course has been almost as disastrous. With the country’s current eight-year plan at the halfway mark, the government announced that fully 200 of its 335 economic projects had not yet been begun, added morosely that none of the programs aimed at earning foreign exchange had worked. Indonesia’s flashily colored currency, the rupiah, last week skidded to a hundredth of its official value: 4,500 to the U.S. dollar on the free market v. a government-controlled rate of 45. At the annual congress of the Civil Servants Union, government clerks demanded a raise. They had cause; a bachelor clerk today earns only 450 rupiah, or one thin dime, a month.

Even with more money, there would be little to buy. With rice in short supply, Sukarno urged his people to cultivate a taste for corn and sweet potatoes. That could help to balance the diet of rat meat recommended by Communist Party Chairman D. N. Aidit, executive chairman of Indonesia’s antirodent drive. “If the peasants start eating rats eagerly,” said Aidit, “the rats will be wiped out, and there will even be a shortage of rats.”

Rockets & Euphoria. None of this hardship seemed to affect the leaders of Sukarno’s swollen (412,000-man) armed forces, which this year will receive half of Indonesia’s $2 billion budget. Gold-braided and grinning, the army chief of staff recently pressed a button on a Djakarta beach to lob an Indonesia-built rocket a full 21 miles into the Java Sea. Immediately the army began boasting that it would have intercontinental ballistic missiles in no time at all.

What’s more, exclaimed one euphoric brigadier, “we plan to explode an atom bomb next year.” Though Indonesia does have a functioning nuclear reactor (supplied by the U.S. Atoms for Peace program), it cannot produce materials for weapons. Even the foreign ministry shamefacedly admitted as much. The brigadier’s boast was so patently hollow that the Malaysians—who obviously were the target of its propaganda potential—scornfully talked of Sukarno’s “bamboo bomb.”

And even if the Bung’s wobbly country could support the debilitating cost of developing a bomb, Sukarno could not count on being around to profit from it. He has aged visibly since his treatment for a kidney ailment last month, and his hands are as paper-thin and shaky as his economy. Sukarno, 63, has lately begun suffering from intimations of mortality, told a confident that he would like to be buried on Bali, the Indonesian island of lovely women where his mother was born.