JAKARTA, 22 October 2005 — US goodwill envoy Karen Hughes got an earful from a group of mostly female Indonesian Muslim students yesterday, who expressed anger at the US-led invasion of Iraq and attacked Washington’s foreign policies.
Tasked by US President George W. Bush to polish America’s image overseas, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy is in Jakarta to meet leading Muslim clerics and students during a tour of the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
“Why does America always act as if they were the police of the world?,” Barikatul Hikmah, a 20-year-old student at the prestigious Syarif Hidayatullah University asked Hughes. Another of the 15 students taking part, Lailatul Qadar, a 19-year-old student wearing colorful headscarves, added: “It’s Bush in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and maybe it’s going to be in Indonesia, I don’t know. Who’s the terrorist? Bush or us?”
Hughes, who was largely composed during the session, defended the invasion of Iraq as necessary to protect the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because the administration saw Saddam Hussein as a security threat. “After all, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, like he murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people using poison gas against them,” she said.
“After Sept. 11, the leaders of America had to look at the threat of the world in a very different way ... I think you have to understand the horror and the shocks that Americans went through.”
Most of the handpicked students who spoke at the one-hour session in Jakarta focused on Iraq. Hughes told reporters later she was not surprised the tone of most questions was strongly critical, despite Indonesia’s reputation as a moderate Muslim country. They were similar to what she would “really expect at any college campus across the world, including in America,” she said.
