Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (born 1949) won election as president of the Republic of Indonesia in October of 2004, thus becoming his country's first directly elected president.
An officer in the Indonesian army, but one regarded as a moderate with few links to the military's history of violent excesses, Yudhoyono found himself at the center of some of the world's biggest news stories of the mid-2000s. He faced the challenge of responding to an unprecedented series of natural disasters, including the devastating tsunami of 2004. As Indonesia, the world's most populous predominantly Islamic country, suffered the effects of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists, it was Yudhoyono who had to bring the perpetrators to justice without alienating the country's Islamic clergy. Educated partly in the United States, Yudhoyono was one of that country's few defenders in the Islamic world in the years after the launch of the Iraq war. And he encountered problems common to leaders of developing countries: reducing institutional corruption, improving infrastructure, and attracting foreign investment. A deliberate man sometimes dubbed "the thinking general," Yudhoyono maintained strong popularity among ordinary Indonesians who used a different nickname: his initials, SBY.Born into Military FamilySusilo Bambang Yudhoyono was born in the small town of Pacitan, in eastern Java (Indonesia's largest and most populous island), on September 9, 1949. He would later speak out in favor of the preservation of the local language, Javanese, in the face of the increasing influence of Indonesian, the national lingua franca. Yudhoyono's father was a retired lieutenant in the Indonesian army, and Yudhoyono, out of high school and newly married, entered the country's national military academy. He and his wife, Ani, raised two sons.Yudhoyono graduated in 1973 at the top of his class. He served several tours of duty in the volatile East Timor region, where a separatist movement battled the Indonesian government for two decades until finally winning independence in 1999.
