America's Indonesian PR Blitz

By Diane Farsetta, PR Watch. Posted December 22, 2005.

In September 2005, long-time Bush confidante Karen Hughes started her new job as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Her first official week of work was admittedly ambitious -- a "listening tour" of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

At each stop, carefully selected audiences comprised of students on U.S.-funded scholarships, women professionals, and others deemed "safe" nonetheless deviated from the intended script, asking Hughes challenging questions and openly criticizing her answers. Commentators panned Hughes' performance as "blundering," and a "preachy and culturally insensitive ... superficial PR blitz."

The one high-profile opinion piece praising Hughes, published by USA Today, was written "at the State Department's invitation" and followed Hughes' special briefing of the author, Geoffrey Cowan, the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

On her next major trip, to Indonesia in late October, Hughes didn't fare much better. The students invited to talk with her at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta called the United States "two-faced" and "unfair." Referring to the U.S. war on Iraq, one student asked Hughes, "Who's the terrorists?" Another challenged, "Why does America always act as if they are the policeman of the world?" Again, Hughes' responses were deemed inadequate by both audience members and outside observers.

Hughes' credibility was further undermined when she told the Indonesian students (and, hours later, repeated to a group of journalists) that Saddam Hussein had gassed hundreds of thousands of people. State Department officials later clarified that Hughes had confused the estimated total number of Iraqi deaths during Hussein's 24-year rule -- 300,000 -- with the 5,000 civilians killed in the 1988 attack on the city of Halabja.

Given her record so far, it may be comforting to note that Karen Hughes' overseas junkets are just one facet of the U.S. government's non-military attempts to combat terrorism and bolster its image worldwide.

But are other approaches -- primarily through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), but also including the Peace Corps, foreign embassies and other State Department programs -- any more effective? A review of U.S. outreach to Indonesia, the Southeast Asian island nation with the world's largest Muslim population, suggests mixed results at best.

U.S. rep takes an Asian vacation

There's no doubt that the United States' image has tarnished greatly over the last few years. In April 2005, the Program on International Policy Attitudes released a 23 country poll that found the United States holds "the dubious distinction of having the largest number of countries rating it as having a negative influence." While 47 percent of all respondents called the United States a "mostly negative" force in the world, that fraction was significantly higher in majority Muslim countries like Turkey (62 percent) and Indonesia (51 percent).

At first glance, Indonesia seems like it should be an easy audience for the Bush administration's sell job. U.S. administrations and businesses have had close relations with the country's leaders since General Suharto took power in the bloody coup of 1965-1966. (When Suharto -- who was Indonesia's president for 32 years -- visited the United States in 1995, a senior Clinton administration official called the repressive dictator "our kind of guy.") Moreover, Indonesia has suffered greatly from non-state terrorism, including the tragic Bali bombings of October 2002. Lastly, the vast majority of the population follows moderate forms of Islam.

According to the State Department, Indonesia's ambivalence towards the United States isn't because U.S. officials don't recognize the country's strategic importance. The State Department's budget request justification to Congress for fiscal year 2003 (the first filed after September 2001) states, "Indonesia's cooperation is vital in the war against terrorism." The Department's 2004 budget justification further explains, "Since a major reordering of priorities after 9/11, we have increased our efforts on educational exchange and outreach to the Indonesian Islamic community."

In fact, increased U.S. support for moderate Muslim groups post-9/11 is a worldwide phenomenon. According to an April 2005 U.S. News & World Report article, "From military psychological-operations teams and CIA covert operatives to openly funded media and think tanks, Washington is plowing tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself." The lead agency in the "Muslim World Outreach" effort, the article continued, is USAID. And "in no country is the effort more pronounced than Indonesia. ... Working behind the scenes, USAID now helps fund more than 30 Muslim organizations in the country."

USAID/Indonesia's Islamic outreach includes "workshops for Islamic preachers," "curriculum reform for schools from rural academies to Islamic universities," a "talk show on Islam and tolerance," a syndicated newspaper column, and funding for Islamic think tanks conducting "scholarly research showing liberal Islam's compatibility with democracy and human rights," David Kaplan wrote in U.S. News & World Report.

Diane Farsetta is senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy.

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