US Peace Corps in Indonesia

Indonesia is busy tightening its security ahead of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visit to Jakarta on Wednesday.

One of the important agenda of talks between the two countries is the return of Peace Corps which was iniated during JF Kennedy and Sukarno’s presidency. LA Times has the report:

The last time Indonesiaallowed Peace Corps volunteers to work here, they weren’t sent into villages to teach English or build schools. The Americans were assigned to whip athletes into shape for the 1964 Olympics.

The peculiar aid to reluctant hosts didn’t work out: Jakarta ended up boycotting the Tokyo Games, and thugs from the Indonesian Communist Party, which accused the American coaches of being CIA agents, ran them out of the country in 1965, less than three years after they had arrived.

More than four decades later, when Islamic extremism is considered the biggest foreign threat to the United States, the Obama administration hopes to persuade the government of the world’s most populous Muslim country to let the Peace Corps return.