Indonesian politician, appointed the fifth President of Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country and third-largest democracy, in Jakarta at 15:50 local time (14:20 GMT) on 7/23/2001. The daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Achmed Sukarno, her first name, Megawati, refers to the rain clouds under which she was born (“Mega”) while her second name, Sukarnoputri, means Daughter of Sukarno.
As a toddler she moved with her family into the luxurious Merdeka (Freedom) Palace in Jakarta in 1949; the home for nearly two decades where she grew up at ease with the politicians, generals, religious scholars, painters, writers and actresses that frequented the informal court of President Sukarno. While her father eventually had five or six official wives and eight legitimate children, Megawati was happy with her nanny and many stepmothers. No intellectual, she dropped out of her university studies in Psychology and Agriculture.
In 1967 when General Soeharto came to power the army threw Megawati’s family out of the Palace and her father under house arrest. He had to get special permission to attend Megawati’s first wedding in 1968 to an air-force pilot. Her father died in 1970 and then, distraught, she lost her husband in an air accident in 1971 while pregnant with their second child.
The following year, when she eloped with an Egyptian diplomat, her family had the marriage annulled within weeks amid adverse publicity. In 1973 she married Taufiq Kiemas and her third and last child was born. Kiemas took up the management of the petrol stations bequeathed to the Sukarno family by Suharto.
Considering herself a member of the royal family and political aristocracy, Megawati enjoyed cooking, her garden, homemaking, shopping trips to Singapore, jewelry collecting and doting on her grandchildren rather than fussing over the world of politics and economics. However in 1987 at the urging of her husband and leaders of the democrats and nationalists, Megawati joined Suharto’s rubber stamp parliament as legislator for the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, but had little to say during her six-year apprenticeship into politics, becoming more famous for her silences than her utterances.
With the fall of Suharto and the advent of free parliamentary elections in 1999, Megawati’s party joined with Abdurrahman Wahid’s moderate Islamic party to win government. Although Megawati had received 35% of the vote and Wahid only 12%, she became Wahid’s vice president, literally playing his handmaiden by at times preparing and feeding breakfast to the ageing and near-blind president in her Jakarta home. No Indira Gandhi or Corazon Aquino, Megawati was said to have been “habitually aloof” and “uncomfortable” with the cynical machinations of politics and Wahid especially because he gossiped about her private life by telling palace visitors that she was having extra-marital affairs. The “mystical” and widely-loved Megawati with her “oblique” style of politics is regarded by many Indonesians as the embodiment of the “Ibu Pertiwi” or Motherland. Despite past treatment by the military under Suharto she is close to the armed forces and managed to oust Wahid to claim the presidency in 2001.
Link to Wikipedia biography