Sukarno

Sukarno (6 June 1901 – 21 June 1970) was an Indonesian statesman and revolutionary who served as the first president of Indonesia from 1945 to 1967. Born Kusno Sosrodihardjo at Surabaya, he led the nationalist movement against Dutch colonial rule, proclaimed Indonesian independence with Mohammad Hatta on 17 August 1945, and is remembered as the "Father of Proclamation". Removed from power after the upheavals of 1965–1967, he lived under house arrest until his death at Jakarta. ¹

He was the son of Raden Soekemi Sosrodihardjo, a Muslim Javanese primary school teacher from Grobogan, and Ida Ayu Nyoman Rai, a Hindu Balinese woman of the Brahmin caste from Buleleng. Born at Surabaya, where his father had been posted, he was originally named Kusno Sosrodihardjo and, following Javanese custom, was renamed after surviving a childhood illness. He went to school at Mojokerto and then to the Hogere Burgerschool at Surabaya in 1916, where he met Tjokroaminoto, the nationalist founder of Sarekat Islam, whose daughter Siti Oetari he married in 1920. He studied civil engineering at the Technische Hoogeschool in Bandung, graduating as an engineer in 1926, and practised architecture there with his friend Anwari. ¹

On 4 July 1927 Sukarno and his friends from the Algemeene Studieclub founded the Indonesian National Party (PNI), and he was elected its first leader. The party advocated independence, opposed imperialism and capitalism, and advocated secularism and unity among the Indies' many peoples. The colonial government repeatedly disrupted his meetings; he was tried at Bandung in 1930 and spent, in all, over a decade under Dutch detention and exile — including a period at Bengkulu, where he taught religious lessons at a Muhammadiyah school — until the invading Japanese released him in 1942. ¹

On the Japanese surrender, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945, and Sukarno became president the next day. He led the resistance to the Dutch attempt to restore colonial rule until the Netherlands recognised Indonesian independence in 1949. After a tumultuous period of parliamentary democracy he introduced "Guided Democracy" in 1959, pursued an aggressive anti-imperialist foreign policy, and positioned Indonesia as a leading voice of the Non-Aligned Movement. ¹

On 1 October 1965, after the 30 September Movement, General Suharto assumed control of the government in a military takeover, accompanied by mass killings of members and suspected sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party in which between 500,000 and over a million people died. Suharto officially became president in 1967, and Sukarno was placed under house arrest until his death at Jakarta on 21 June 1970. He was buried at Blitar, East Java, next to his mother. His fourteen children include Megawati Sukarnoputri, later Indonesia's fifth president; the parent relation is written once, in this record. ^{1 2}

Foreign accounts sometimes call him Achmed Sukarno. The English article, citing a source from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explains that "Achmed" was coined by M. Zein Hassan, an Indonesian student at al-Azhar who later worked at the Ministry, to establish Sukarno's identity as a Muslim to the Egyptian press after a controversy alleging his name was "not Muslim enough"; Sukarno afterwards signed correspondence with the Middle East as "Achmed Sukarno". ¹

No source read for this record names a school for Sukarno. Wikidata gives Islam generically, and the Arabic and Urdu articles file him by category under Indonesian Muslims and Muslim socialists — filings, not attestations. The English article records his mixed parentage, the "Achmed" episode, his teaching at a Muhammadiyah school while exiled, and a political philosophy fusing Marxism, nationalism and Islam; parentage, diplomatic presentation, teaching and political programme are none of them an attestation of a school, and his syncretic Javanese milieu is culture, not affiliation. His faith is therefore recorded as unknown, with the generic attestation preserved in the data file. ^{1 3 4 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.