Indonesia: Into Space

• Share

On a barnstorming tour of the boondocks aimed at whipping up enthusiasm for his threatened invasion of Nether lands New Guinea, Indonesia's President Sukarno took along a star-studded cast: ten admiring foreign ambassadors, including the U.S.'s Howard Palfrey Jones, Soviet Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, a brigade of local beauties. As an unexpected thrill for the crowds along the way, there was even an unsuccessful assassination attempt.

In his fourth brush with violent death, Sukarno was 100 yards away when a grenade exploded near his stalled car in the south Celebes city of Makassar. As always, the escape raised Sukarno's prestige to a new peak among his superstitious countrymen and served his immediate strategy. At a Djakarta reception next night, he cried dramatically: "They tried to kill me." Aides left no doubt that by "they" Sukarno meant the Dutch, although no one knows who actually planted the grenade. Communist China's Chou En-lai sent Sukarno a message condemning "imperialist ruffians." Khrushchev sent a "sincerely rejoicing" cable on the President's survival.

Anti-Dutch Aloha. For all Sukarno's impassioned denunciations of Dutch "imperialism," in The Netherlands last week indignation was mainly directed at the U.S. and Ambassador Jones. A competent diplomat who has spent five years in Indonesia and has become deeply attached to the country, genial, guitar-twanging Howard Jones, 63, is an effusive admirer of Sukarno's oratory. Says he: "He's the greatest public speaker I've heard since William Jennings Bryan." After one of Sukarno's inflammatory anti-Dutch orations during his East Indonesia swing, Jones was introduced to the crowd and cried into the microphone: "Merdeka [Freedom]!" Just before Jones, the Soviet Ambassador had stepped up to the mike and intoned: "Merdeka Irian Barat [Freedom for West New Guinea]." Jones's choice of words stirred a furor in The Netherlands, where a high government official was quoted as describing him as ''Sukarno's court jester." There were questions in Parliament, and Foreign Minister Joseph Luns expressed his government's "displeasure" with the U.S. Howard Jones insisted that Merdeka "is used almost the same way in Indonesia as 'hello' elsewhere, or 'aloha' in Hawaii," and added: "I can't imagine anyone in America objecting to my standing up and saying 'Liberty.' " But the Dutch press pointed out that the word was the rallying cry of Indonesia's rebels when the country gained its independence from The Netherlands in 1949, and still has strong anti-Dutch overtones. Stormed the Nieuwe Rotterdamse: "Would Mr. Jones, if he were serving as a diplomat in the Berlin of the Third Reich, also have used the form of greeting that was normal in those days for Germans?"*