indonesia president susilo bambang yudhoyono
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, 59, is a retired general and the president of Indonesia. In July 2009 he became the first Indonesian president ever re-elected, winning in a landslide. It was only the second time that Indonesians have directly chosen their president. More than 120 million people cast ballots across the country, which emerged from three decades of military rule barely 10 years ago. Mr. Yudhoyono captured 61 percent of the vote, winning all but 5 of Indonesia’s 33 provinces.
Mr. Yudhoyono rose to prominence during the era of military rule under the late President Suharto, which lasted for 32 years, until 1998, but he has come to be viewed as the leader most capable of extricating Indonesia from that past.
As the crisis around General Suharto’s presidency reached a peak in 1998 after the collapse of the Indonesian currency, Mr. Yudhoyono began meeting with one of the country’s prominent Muslim leaders, Nurcholish Madjid, to find a way for General Suharto to resign.
Mr. Yudhoyono was born on Sept. 9, 1949, in Pacitan, a small town in east Java. He is considered a steady, broadly educated man. Many Indonesians believe he was the first person with a suitable background and sufficient training to become president since the country’s transition to democracy began.
After emerging at the top of his class in the military academy in 1973, Mr. Yudhoyono was selected to go to the United States in 1976 for military training at Fort Benning, Ga.
That was at the height of the warm relationship between the United States and the Suharto government, which was viewed in Washington at the time as a bulwark against Communism in Southeast Asia. In 1990, he was selected for a yearlong course at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
Early in his new term, Indonesian police foiled plans to assassinate President Yudhoyono, in a significant escalation in the profile of terrorism attacks that have taken hundreds of lives in Indonesia in recent years.
The police raids on terrorist plotters came one month after suicide attacks on the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta that killed seven people, six of them foreigners, as well as the two bombers.
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