A Question of Prestige

One Javanese dawn last week, just as Indonesia's Foreign Minister Roeslan Abdulgani was packing his bags to leave for the London conference, a jeep crunched to a stop on the gravel in front of his house. When Abdulgani answered the door, a crisp young army officer announced: "I have a warrant to detain you." The charge: Abdulgani was involved in a $130,000 rake-off from the firms that printed the 43 million ballots for last year's Indonesian elections.

Abdulgani knew who was behind the charge: Indonesia's fanatically antiCommunist, anticorruption Army Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel Zulkifli Lubis, who has built up a hot-eyed corps of supporters among younger army officers. Abdulgani gasped, then recovered his composure and replied calmly: "I realize you are acting under orders, but so am I. My orders are from the Prime Minister. They instruct me to head our government's delegation to London."

Bath & Bandage. He requested permission to telephone Premier Ali Sastroamidjojo, a man with considerable experience in such matters. (In 1955 army officers led by Colonel Lubis brought down Sastroamidjojo's government by refusing to accept an appointment made by Dr. Ali's Moscow-trained Defense Minister.)

Having explained his predicament to the Premier, Abdulgani persuaded his captor to let him take a bath and rebandage his right hand, from which doctors had recently removed the shrapnel left there by a Dutch mortar in 1948. While the Foreign Minister stalled, goateed Ali Sastroamidjojo hastily rounded up Army Chief of Staff Abdul Haris Nasution and headed for the scene of action. Striding into Abdulgani's house just two hours before the Foreign Minister's plane was due to take off, the Premier cocked a wary eye at the young officer's pistol belt, then boldly insisted: "In the interests of the state, I request you to release the Foreign Minister." When Nasution made the request an order, Abdulgani was finally turned loose to finish his packing.

Loyalty Test. Four days later, in a rousing Independence Day speech, Indonesia's President Sukarno alluded delicately in passing to the Abdulgani incident. "Any step deliberately taken to sully the position and prestige of our state," said Sukarno, "is unnational and antirevolutionary. It is the bounden duty of the government to forestall any such unnational activities." Whether or not there was any substance to the colonel's accusation against the Foreign Minister, there was widespread agreement in Indonesia that Sukarno and Sastroamidjojo were now well awake to Communist infiltration and no longer indifferent to governmental corruption, and that Colonel Lubis' highhanded methods were no longer justifiable. He is suspected of desiring a Latin American-type army junta.

At week's end Colonel Lubis. reluctantly facing transfer out of the capital to a field command in Sumatra, was proclaiming in distinctly unnational tones that "unless the government improves itself. there will be posed the very serious question of where my loyalty lies."

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