Obama statue in Jakarta will be removed after protests on internet

by Richard Lloyd Parry

A statue of the young Barack Obama, intended to commemorate the time he lived in Indonesia as a boy, is to be removed from a park in Jakarta after a campaign of protest on the internet.

The decision to remove the “Barry Dream Statue”, which depicts a 10-year-old Obama Jr smiling as a butterfly alights on his left thumb, is an embarrassment to both governments, coming as it does just over a month before the president’s first official visit to Indonesia.

The Jakarta governor’s office confirmed that the 6ft-tall bronze sculpture will be moved from Menteng Park in the centre of the city to a nearby primary school that the future president attended in the late 1960s.

The bronze Obama is depicted carrying the Nobel peace prize around his neck; on the statue’s plinth is a quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt: “The future belongs to those who believe in the power of their dreams.” Opponents of the statue argued that its place should be reserved for Indonesian heroes, or at least for leaders who have done more than Mr Obama to prove themselves worthy of a place in history.

Obama has not yet contributed anything significant to Indonesia, or even the world, that warrants him having a statue in, ironically, one of the nicest parks in Jakarta,” wrote one columnist in the Jakarta Post. “Much like his Nobel peace prize, his statue is unwarranted.”

Several groups opposing it were formed on the social networking site Facebook, attracting tens of thousands of members.

Mr Obama lived in Jakarta between 1967 to 1971 with his mother Ann Dunham and his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, an experience that he described in his book The Audacity of Hope.

“Without the money to go to an international school, I went to a local Indonesian school and ran the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors and clerks,” he wrote. “I remember those years as a joyous time, full of adventure and mystery, days of chasing down chickens and running from water buffaloes.”
He will visit Indonesia, as well as Australia and the US island of Guam, in the second half of March. He is expected to speak about his commitment to building bridges with moderate Muslims, in the country with the world’s largest Islamic population.