INDONESIA: Djago, the Rooster

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Geisha Delights. Police and pemuda (youth action groups) took over the streets of Djakarta. Sections of the city were cordoned off and a house-to-house search made for dissidents. Mohammed Natsir, the titular head of the Masjumi Party, and Sjafruddin Prawira-negara, ex-governor of the Bank of Indonesia, found themselves harassed by threatening phone calls at all hours of the day and night; armed hoodlums tramped through their houses and the police ignored their complaints. In fear of their lives, they fled Djakarta for the clearer air of Padang. Colonel Sumual flew in to Padang from the Celebes and Colonel Barlian from South Sumatra. Dagger-bearded Colonel Zulkifli Lubis, onetime deputy chief of staff and probably the shrewdest of the Padang rebels, appeared also, although the police were searching for him in Djakarta as a prime suspect in the attempted assassination. Snapped Lubis: "I didn't do it. If I had planned it, .it would not have failed." An ultimatum was dispatched to hand-wringing Premier Djuanda in the capital: unless a new anti-Communist Cabinet was formed under Hatta or the Sultan of Djogjakarta, the rebels would establish a counter-government of their own. Two of the colonels flew to Japan to deliver the ultimatum personally to Sukarno, who was busy renewing an old acquaintance with a 29-year-old geisha whom he had known under the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. Said Sukarno: "How can you behave this way? Aren't we old friends?"

Six days after Sukarno's return to Djakarta, the rebels got Sukarno's answer—bombings of their communications by government planes, blockade of their coasts by government warships. The men who had made the revolution together were at war.

Mixed Feelings. On paper, the rebels seem doomed. Sukarno has a tiny navy and a small air force (twelve bombers, 20 fighters); the rebels have neither. Sukarno can muster some 85 battalions of troops, the rebels scarcely 14. But the rebels are prepared to fight if attacked, and the army and navy have shown little enthusiasm for turning their guns on brother Indonesians. Military commanders in such outlying spots as Borneo, Timor, Flores, Sumbawa, the Moluccas hastened to promise loyalty to Djakarta but with the proviso that, unfortunately, they had no forces to spare for an invasion of the rebel areas. The only dependable government arm is the air force of General Sukarni Suridarma, who has Communist sympathies and a tall, good-looking Eurasian (and Communist) wife.

The rebels must avoid being strangled economically. Their agents in Singapore are dickering for patrol boats to help break the naval blockade of rebel ports, and have reportedly purchased six transport planes that can be used either as courier planes or bombers. In Padang, machine-gun posts are protected by sandbag revetments, and Sumatran youth are being drilled in guerrilla tactics. In the Celebes, Colonel Sumual has recaptured Gorontalo from the government forces that seized the city and boasts that he can raise 30,000 men against a government invasion.