Adam Malik

Adam Malik (1917–1984) was an Indonesian politician, diplomat and journalist: co-founder of the Antara news agency, foreign minister from 1966 to 1977, president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1971–1972, a founder of ASEAN, and third vice president of Indonesia from 1978 to 1983. ^{1 2}

Adam Malik Batubara was born on 22 July 1917 at Pematangsiantar, North Sumatra, into a Muslim Mandailing Batak family of the Batubara clan; his parents were traders, comfortable enough to own the town's only Buick sedan. He was schooled at the Hollandsch-Inlandsche School and spent a year and a half at the Sumatra Thawalib Islamic boarding school at Parabek in Bukittinggi before returning to help his parents. The family's faith is recorded here as his background; the sources name no school for Malik himself. ¹

At seventeen he chaired the Pematangsiantar branch of Partindo and was jailed for defying the colonial ban on political assemblies. At twenty, in Jakarta, he was among the founders of the Antara news agency in 1937, serving as its editor and deputy director. On 16 August 1945 he was among the youths who carried Sukarno and Hatta to Rengasdengklok to press them to proclaim independence, which they did the next day. ^{1 3}

After terms in parliament and as trade minister, he became ambassador to the Soviet Union and Poland in 1959 and led Indonesia's delegation in the West Irian negotiations. An anti-communist, he stood with Suharto in the transition of 1965–1966 — a period in which, United States archives record, his circle received covert American funds and passed lists of communist cadres to the army — and in 1966 became foreign minister, forming with Suharto and Hamengkubuwono IX the triumvirate that reversed Sukarno's policies. ¹

As foreign minister he rescheduled Indonesia's debts in the West, insisted ASEAN remain an economic rather than military association, co-founded it in 1967, and in 1971 was elected president of the UN General Assembly. Speaker of the assemblies in 1977, he succeeded Hamengkubuwono IX as vice president in 1978 and used the office to criticise the regime's corruption as an "epidemic". He died of liver cancer at Bandung on 5 September 1984, was buried in the Kalibata Heroes' Cemetery, and was declared a National Hero in 1998. ^{1 4}

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