The unusual ties between President Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and former President Sukarno of Indonesia are well known around the world.
Objectively, a striking contrast existed between the two leaders. Kim Il Sung was a thoroughgoing communist and atheist while Sukarno was a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist and faithful religionist. Their age gap was more than ten years and their relations as heads of state were no more than two years long. But they were in unusually friendly relations.
There may be several factors contributing to their close ties, but the main factor was that they both aspired to independence and opposed imperialism and dominationism. This is well testified to by the fact that Sukarno advocated self-reliance and self-supporting economy.
During his visit to the DPRK in November 1964 he came to have a good understanding of self-reliance and self-supporting economy and expressed his deep sympathy for them. That’s why in April 1965 he invited Kim Il Sung who was on a visit to his country to a session of the Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly of Indonesia held in Bandung. At the meeting he delivered a political speech in which he stressed the need to switch over to the road of economic independence and hold aloft the banner of self-reliance to that end. He declared that the esteemed Comrade Kim Il Sung who created the famous idea of self-reliance and successfully built a self-supporting economy with bold determination was present at the meeting, and repeated the word Juche denoting the Juche idea four times in Korean. He continued to say proudly that the switchover he had just mentioned referred to strengthening Juche orientation in Indonesia.
He was probably the first foreign state leader who expressed in Korean his admiration for the Juche idea authored by Kim Il Sung and on an official occasion at that. He was sure that when his country with rich natural resources relied on its own efforts in the style of the DPRK, it would surely achieve genuine independence, freed from the neocolonialist yoke of imperialists. Kim Il Sung expressed his active support to Sukarno’s independent and peace-loving stance. It is therefore no accidental that Sukarno definitely made public his determination to turn his country from the dependent economy to a self-supporting economy.
Sukarno conferred the highest order of Indonesia on Kim Il Sung as a token of his respect for the latter who created and applied the Juche idea.