Indonesia to remove Obama statue
Daily Telegraph
February 05, 2010 8:32PM
A STATUE of US President Barack Obama as a boy will be removed from a park in the Indonesian capital due to public opposition, just weeks before Obama visits his old hometown.
Islam’s Boy Messiah / Prophet,in Bronze,at peace and as one with nature and all who worship his image,seen here in Menteng Park.
The Jakarta governor's office confirmed that the two-metre bronze would be removed from Menteng Park and placed at the nearby Menteng One primary school where Mr Obama spent part of his childhood in the late 1960s.
The decision comes after 56,500 people joined a page on social networking website Facebook calling for the statue to be removed and replaced by a memorial to an Indonesian identity.
"The Jakarta administration has decided to remove the Obama statue from Menteng Park and take it to his former school,'' city spokesman Cucu Ahmad Kurnia said.
"We follow the aspirations of the people, who think that the removal of the statue to his former school is more appropriate.''
He said a new site for the statue has not been chosen but it would be somewhere "near the school gate so the public can still view it''.
"We'll remove it as soon as possible, hopefully before Mr Obama's visit to Jakarta,'' the spokesman said.
The statue of "Little Barry'' - as Mr Obama was known to his Indonesian school friends - was designed by Indonesian artists and depicts the boy Obama dressed in shorts and a T-shirt with a butterfly perched on his hand.
Mr Obama, who was born in Hawaii, lived for four years as a child in Jakarta from 1967 after his divorced mother married an Indonesian.
“We're a couple of swells
We stop at the best hotels….”
How long before Beijing’s man on the ground in Australia, Australia’s very own “Dear Leader” Australian PM Lu Kewan aka. Kevin 07 “I have never been a Socialist” Rudd, will commission some nauseating statue or portrait of Hussein Obama,perhaps painted by his grubby little nephew Van Thanh Rudd,as way of proving to the world his total commitment to the Islamic and International Socialism cause.
