The Visiting Armenian

It was a gala scene in Djakarta's plush Hotel Indonesia. A couple of hundred milling guests sipped lemonade or crowded around the guest of honor, Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, flashing his toothy smile. Near by, a 28-girl choir in tight, bright sarongs of multicolored, hand-printed cotton reverently purred Djakarta's hit tune, Crush Malaysia.

It was just what everyone wanted to hear, for Sukarno had hardly returned from the recent Malaysia peace talks in Tokyo when he loosed his bandits again in the rain-drenched jungles of northern Borneo. One band of Indonesians ambushed a British patrol, killing five Gurkhas and wounding six others. Hitting back, Malaysian defenders killed at least seven Indonesian marauders in isolated clashes. There seemed no end to the dreary warfare.

Nor would there be if Mikoyan had his way. In Indonesia for an eleven-day good-will tour, he boasted that Moscow was supplying "very modern arms" to help Sukarno, vowed continued Soviet sympathy with "the struggle of the new emerging forces." When it came to promises of a more concrete kind, Mikoyan was a little vague. Apart from massive arms aid, at least $300 million in Soviet development aid credits has vanished without trace in Indonesia's bottomless pit of corruption, inefficiency and poverty. On his current junket, the crafty Armenian could not help seeing that since his last visit to Sukarno-land two years ago, the swarms of scrawny, barefoot children had grown thinner and hungrier and the tens of thousands of beggars blocking the streets and sidewalks more pitiful and insistent in this the 19th year of the era of the affable Bung.

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