Indonesia to remove Obama statue from public park

The Jakarta governor's office confirmed that the two-metre bronze would be removed from Menteng Park and placed at the nearby school.

JAKARTA, February 5, 2010 (AFP) - A statue of US President Barack Obama as a boy will be removed from a park in the Indonesian capital due to public opposition, officials said Friday, just weeks before Obama visits his old hometown.

The Jakarta governor's office confirmed that the two-metre (six-foot) bronze would be removed from Menteng Park and placed at the nearby Menteng One primary school where 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 told AFP.

"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 Obama's visit to Jakarta," the spokesman added.

The statue of "Little Barry" -- as 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.

Obama, who was born in Hawaii, lived for four years as a child in Jakarta from 1967 after his divorced mother married an Indonesian.

The White House announced Monday that Obama and his family will visit Indonesia in March.

The trip has been eagerly awaited in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country since Obama's inauguration, which was welcomed in Indonesia as the start of a new era in US diplomacy.