The Vagrant MIG

A flight of four MIG jet fighter planes, with the red and white markings of the Indonesian air force, flashed over the capital city of Djakarta one day last week. Suddenly, one of the MIGs broke formation and, with spitting guns, dived on Merdeka palace, residence of President Sukarno. Bullets smashed through the roof, and chandeliers exploded into glass splinters. A man whitewashing an outside wall was hit in the shoulder; a sentry fell, wounded in the thigh; two passers-by were hit in the legs.

Personable President Sukarno was presiding at a meeting of his Supreme Advisory Council, only a few hundred feet from the palace. When the firing ceased, Sukarno paused only to grab a long-handled black umbrella and then raced across the palace lawn, was relieved to find that his seven children had not yet come home from school.

Missing Again. The vagrant MIG flew on to the nearby port city of Tandjung-priok, opened fire at the huge gas tank of the Stanvac Oil Co., missed the tank but wounded 14 people. Next, the plane swept over Bogor, 30 miles from Djakarta, made a strafing run at Sukarno's massive Bogor palace, and missed again. With its fuel exhausted, the MIG made a bellylanding in a West Java rice field. As the pilot, Lieut. Daniel Mauker, 28, looking dazed and shaken, stumbled from his Russian-made plane, he was seized.

Air Marshal Suryadarma rushed to Merdeka palace and tried desperately to explain what had happened. He had much explaining to do, for it developed that trigger-happy Lieut. Mauker comes from revolt-ridden North Celebes, and has been on the police blacklists for some time (his brother was under arrest there for suspected dealings with the anti-Communist rebels). Government officials gulped even more uncomfortably on learning that Mauker had been one of the Indonesian pilots to fly escort for Nikita Khrushchev when the Soviet leader came to visit Sukarno last month.

Off on a Trip. Outsiders can seldom make sense of Indonesian politics, but last week Indonesians as well as outsiders were in confusion. Why, they asked, did the three pilots flying with Mauker not try to shoot him down? Was Lieut. Mauker sane and a conspirator, or was he out of his mind? Sukarno appeared to take the assassination attempt in stride, just as he had the last one in 1957, when five grenades were hurled at him, killing ten bystanders but leaving the President unscathed.

Only four days before Mauker's strafing, Sukarno had suspended the 257-man Indonesian Parliament, thus removing the nation's last vestige of constitutional democracy. Through his tame Supreme Advisory Council, Sukarno ordered sweeping land-reform measures, directly threatening the vast plantations producing rubber, palm oil, tobacco, tea, sugar and coffee chat have been in foreign hands for decades. It was an action that seemed certain to depress even further the nation's faltering economy (the Indonesian rupiah stands at 450 to the dollar on the free market, as opposed to a "legal" value of 45 to the dollar). At week's end, despite the strafing, the grumbling of members of the dismissed Parliament, and the political and military unrest, President Sukarno was still planning to leave on April 1 for another of his long junkets, this time to Africa and the Middle East. Whenever things get too worrisome at home, it's so nice to go off on a trip.

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