INDONESIA: The Band Played All Day Long

In Djakarta, movie theaters were shut down and sirens screamed to herald the event. From one end of Indonesia to the other public-address systems were at the ready, and on Indonesian ships at sea crew members gathered around the radio. At long last President Sukarno was ready to announce his plan for converting Indonesia into a "guided democracy."

Nobody could deny that Indonesia's government needs some kind of rejuvenation. Large chunks of Sumatra. Indonesia's richest island, have been in open revolt. Deprived of much of the revenue from Sumatra's exports (oil, tin and rubber), the central government has been forced to issue an emergency decree lowering the legal ratio of gold to paper currency from 20% to 15%. For nearly three months the crumbling Cabinet of hapless Premier Ali Sastroamidjojo has clung to office largely on Sukarno's insistence.

In an hour-long shower of off-the-cuff eloquence, mercurial President Sukarno blamed everything on the existence of opposition parties. "Many opposition leaders oppose the government just for the sake of opposition," complained Sukarno. "Every Cabinet has faced this. No Cabinet has been able to survive long because of the continuing crisis ... I won't say Western democracy is bad. It is simply not suitable for Indonesia."

The Hooker. To get around the inconveniences of unguided democracy, Sukarno proposed to hobble the Cabinet and concentrate political power in the hands of an extraparliamentary National Council, whose members he himself would select. In the new, "mutual-help" Cabinet, said he, "will sit all parties* represented in Parliament. Side by side with the Cabinet will be the National Council, whose membership will include all layers of our community. The council's function will be to advise the Cabinet whether or not it is asked to do so."

Then Sukarno got to the real hooker: his long-cherished plan to include Communists in both the Cabinet and the prospective National Council. To justify the Communist presence, he echoed one of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln, in a Biblical reference. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," he intoned. "How can we ignore a group which won 6,000,000 votes in the general election?"

The Band Plays On. Nobody in Indonesia is big enough to challenge Sukarno, but it remains to be seen whether he can get his "new concept" accepted.

Nervously, the independent newspaper Indonesia Raya recalled the price paid by Czechoslovakia for admitting Communists to her Cabinet: "It wasn't long before the Communists were running the country." The powerful Moslem parties oppose admitting Communists to the government.

In the eyes of Indonesia's masses, how ever, eloquent Bung (Brother) Karno can do no wrong. This time, too, Sukarno had Indonesia's best-disciplined political party on his side. In Djakarta's buses, trains and streets jubilant Reds distributed thousands of leaflets hailing the President's plan, and in the downtown headquarters of the Communist Party a band played all day long.