Founding president of Indonesia and a spellbinding orator, Sukarno held together an archipelago of thousands of islands and hundreds of peoples through force of voice and a unifying national creed, Pancasila. He proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945, hosted the 1955 Bandung Conference as a global voice for the non-aligned world, then replaced parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian Guided Democracy. His balancing act between army and Communist Party collapsed after a murky 1965 coup attempt; General Suharto seized power, mass killings followed, and Sukarno died under house arrest in 1970.
He could hold an enormous crowd spellbound for hours, and he believed he could hold a country the same way. Sukarno looked at an archipelago of thousands of islands, hundreds of languages, and a dozen faiths, and he insisted it was one nation. On 17 August 1945, days after Japan's surrender, he stood in a Jakarta yard and read a two-sentence proclamation that called Indonesia into existence. For twenty years his voice was the thing that held it together. Then the balancing act that was his genius turned into the trap that destroyed him. In 1965 a failed coup gave the army its opening, the killing began, and the man who had imagined the nation was placed under house arrest in it. He died there, the father of a country that had stopped letting him speak.