Written by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and was originally published in TIME. Aug 23, 1999
He united his country and set it free. He liberated his people from a sense of inferiority and made them feel proud to be Indonesian--no small achievement, coming after 350 years of Dutch colonial rule and three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation. What Sukarno did on Aug. 17, 1945 was no different from what Thomas Jefferson had done for Americans on July 4, 1776. Perhaps even more: Sukarno was the only Asian leader of the modern era able to unify people of such differing ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds without shedding a drop of blood. Compare his record with that of Suharto, his successor, who killed or imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people to establish his New Order regime.
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