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Thursday, November 8, 2012
China submarines to soon carry nukes, draft U.S. report says
Reuters) - China appears to be within two years of deploying submarine-launched nuclear weapons, adding a new leg to its nuclear arsenal that should lead to arms-reduction talks, a draft report by a congressionally mandated U.S. commission says.
China in the meantime remains "the most threatening" power in cyberspace and presents the largest challenge to U.S. supply chain integrity, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in a draft of its 2012 report to the U.S. Congress.
China is alone among the original nuclear weapons states to be expanding its nuclear forces, the report said. The others are the United States, Russia, Britain and France.
Beijing is "on the cusp of attaining a credible nuclear triad of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and air-dropped nuclear bombs," the report says.
China has had a largely symbolic ballistic missile submarine capability for decades but is only now set to establish a "near-continuous at-sea strategic deterrent," the draft said.
Chinese President Hu Jintao has made it a priority to modernize the country's navy. China launched its first aircraft carrier, purchased from Ukraine and then refurbished, in September.
"Building strong national defense and powerful armed forces that are commensurate with China's international standing and meet the needs of its security and development interests is a strategic task of China's modernization drive," Hu said in a speech on Thursday at the opening of the Chinese Communist Party's once-every-five-years congress.
To address a wide variety of security threats, "we must make major progress in modernizing national defense and the armed forces," Hu said.
That means China must "complete military mechanization and make major progress in full military IT (information technology) application by 2020," he said.
The deployment of a hard-to-track, submarine-launched leg of China's nuclear arsenal could have significant consequences in East Asia and beyond. It also could add to tensions between the United States and China, the world's two biggest economies.
Any Chinese effort to ensure a retaliatory capability against a U.S. nuclear strike "would necessarily affect Indian and Russian perceptions about the potency of their own deterrent capabilities vis-à-vis China," the report said, for instance.
ARMS CONTROL TALKS URGED
China is party to many major international pacts and regimes regarding nuclear weapons and materials. But it remains outside of key arms limitation and control conventions, such as the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in April 2010 and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The United States historically has approached these bilaterally with Russia.
The U.S. Congress should require the U.S. State Department to spell out efforts to integrate China into nuclear arms reduction, limitation, and control discussions and agreements, the draft said.
In addition, Congress should "treat with caution" any proposal to unilaterally reduce operational U.S. nuclear forces without clearer information being made available to the public about China's nuclear stockpile and force posture, it said.
China is estimated by the Arms Control Association, a private nonpartisan group in Washington, to have 240 nuclear warheads. The United States, by contrast, has some 5,113, including tactical, strategic and nondeployed weapons.
CHINA DEPLOYING NEW CLASS OF SUBS
Beijing already has deployed two of as many as five of a new class of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. The JIN-class boat is due to carry the JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missile with an estimated range of about 7,400 km (4,600 miles).
The new submarines and the JL-2 missile will give Chinese forces its "first credible sea-based nuclear capability," the U.S. Defense Department said in its own 2012 annual report to Congress on military and security developments involving China.
The JL-2 program has faced repeated delays but may reach an initial operating capability within the next two years, according to the Pentagon report, released in May.
The Pentagon declined to comment directly on China's march toward creating a credible nuclear "triad" involving strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
The final version of the report is to be released next Wednesday by the U.S.-China commission, a 12-member bipartisan group set up in 2000 to report to U.S. lawmakers on security implications of U.S.-China trade.
The draft, in its section on cyber-related issues, called on the Congress to develop a sanctions regime to penalize specific companies found to engage in, or otherwise benefit from, industrial espionage.
Congress should define industrial espionage as an illegal subsidy subject to countervailing duties, it added.
Lawmakers also should craft legislation to boost the security of critical supply chains, "particularly in the context of U.S. government and military procurement," the draft said.
(Additional Writing by Terril Yue Jones; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Nick Macfie)
After Obama win, U.S. backs new U.N. arms treaty talks
Reuters) - Hours after U.S. President Barack Obama was re-elected, the United States backed a U.N. committee's call on Wednesday to renew debate over a draft international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global conventional arms trade.
U.N. delegates and gun control activists have complained that talks collapsed in July largely because Obama feared attacks from Republican rival Mitt Romney if his administration was seen as supporting the pact, a charge Washington denies.
The month-long talks at U.N. headquarters broke off after the United States - along with Russia and other major arms producers - said it had problems with the draft treaty and asked for more time.
But the U.N. General Assembly's disarmament committee moved quickly after Obama's win to approve a resolution calling for a new round of talks March 18-28. It passed with 157 votes in favor, none against and 18 abstentions.
U.N. diplomats said the vote had been expected before Tuesday's U.S. presidential election but was delayed due to Superstorm Sandy, which caused a three-day closure of the United Nations last week.
An official at the U.S. mission said Washington's objectives have not changed.
"We seek a treaty that contributes to international security by fighting illicit arms trafficking and proliferation, protects the sovereign right of states to conduct legitimate arms trade, and meets the concerns that we have been articulating throughout," the official said.
"We will not accept any treaty that infringes on the constitutional rights of our citizens to bear arms," he said.
U.S. officials have acknowledged privately that the treaty under discussion would have no effect on domestic gun sales and ownership because it would apply only to exports.
The main reason the arms trade talks are taking place at all is that the United States - the world's biggest arms trader accounting for more than 40 percent of global conventional arms transfers - reversed U.S. policy on the issue after Obama was first elected and decided in 2009 to support a treaty.
'MONTHS AWAY' FROM DEAL?
Countries that abstained included Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Belarus, Cuba and Iran. China, a major arms producer that has traditionally abstained, voted in favor.
Among the top six arms-exporting nations, Russia cast the only abstention. Britain, France and Germany joined China and the United States in support of the resolution.
The measure now goes to the 193-nation General Assembly for a formal vote. It is expected to pass.
The resolution said countries are "determined to build on the progress made to date towards the adoption of a strong, balanced and effective Arms Trade Treaty."
Jeff Abramson, director of Control Arms, a coalition of advocacy groups, urged states to agree on stringent provisions.
"In Syria, we have seen the death toll rise well over 30,000, with weapons and ammunition pouring in the country for months now," he said. "We need a treaty that will set tough rules to control the arms trade, that will save lives and truly make the world a better place."
Brian Wood of Amnesty International said: "After today's resounding vote, if the larger arms trading countries show real political will in the negotiations, we're only months away from securing a new global deal that has the potential to stop weapons reaching those who seriously abuse human rights."
The treaty would require states to make respecting human rights a criterion for allowing arms exports.
Britain's U.N. mission said on its Twitter feed it hoped that the March negotiations would yield the final text of a treaty. Such a pact would then need to be ratified by the individual signatories before it could enter into force.
The National Rifle Association, the powerful U.S. interest group, strongly opposes the arms treaty and had endorsed Romney.
The United States has denied it sought to delay negotiations for political reasons, saying it had genuine problems with the draft as written.
(Editing by Xavier Briand)
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Katmai Ash Whipped Up By Strong Winds
alaskapublic/There
was volcanic ash in the air over the Shelikof Straight and parts of
Kodiak Island yesterday. A person in Port Lions called KMXT to ask if a
volcano had erupted, but the Alaska Volcano Observatory showed all was
normal. However, it turned out that a volcano had erupted, though it
wasn’t yesterday – it was almost exactly 100 years ago.
The National Weather Service office in Anchorage reported that ash from the Novarupta explosion in 1912 was being whipped up by strong northerly winds because of a lack of snow cover in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes and Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula.
The ash was lifted to about 4,000 feet and drifted over the Shelikof Straight and Kodiak Island. It was a significant enough amount that the weather service issued a warning to pilots, as volcanic ash can damage airplane engines.
Known as the Katmai Eruption, the 1912 explostion came from a volcanic vent later named Novarupta. It was the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th Century and ash fell on Kodiak for three days.
The National Weather Service office in Anchorage reported that ash from the Novarupta explosion in 1912 was being whipped up by strong northerly winds because of a lack of snow cover in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes and Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula.
The ash was lifted to about 4,000 feet and drifted over the Shelikof Straight and Kodiak Island. It was a significant enough amount that the weather service issued a warning to pilots, as volcanic ash can damage airplane engines.
Known as the Katmai Eruption, the 1912 explostion came from a volcanic vent later named Novarupta. It was the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th Century and ash fell on Kodiak for three days.
2.7M without power; Sandy death toll 113
equities/Life
was returning to normal in parts of New York and New Jersey, five days
after Hurricane Sandy hit, but other areas were dark and isolated,
authorities said.
About
2.7 million customers in 15 states and the District of Columbia were
without power Saturday, with at least some facing perhaps another week
before it is restored, CNN reported.
The
U.S. death toll from Hurricane Sandy rose Saturday, reaching 113, the
Los Angeles Times reported, up from 97 Friday. The newspaper said 48 of
the deaths were in New York, followed by New Jersey with 24,
Pennsylvania 14, Maryland 11, West Virginia seven and Connecticut four,
North Carolina two, Virginia two and New Hampshire one.
Residents
of many beach towns on the South Shore of Long Island were waiting for
power to be restored, and even for some sign someone was in charge,
The New York Times reported. Vikki Quinn's house in Long Beach was
flooded and her possessions were piled in the yard.
"I just keep waiting for someone with a megaphone and a car to just tell us what to do," she told the Times. "I'm lost."
President
Barack Obama convened a meeting of top emergency officials in
Washington, with Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo of New
York and Dannel Malloy of Connecticut joining by telephone.
White
House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters members of
the Cabinet reported on their meetings with local officials, first
responders and citizens, and the president spoke individually during the
meeting with the governors and local officials, asking whether there
are "additional federal resources that could be brought to bear to meet
some of the needs in their communities."
Earnest
said the president also got a briefing from the National Weather
Service on a storm forecast to reach the U.S. Northeast Wednesday.
Forecasters said the system could come with high winds, substantial
rainfall and perhaps cooler temperatures.
Lights
were back on Saturday in most of Manhattan. Subway trains began
running between Manhattan and the Long Island boroughs of Brooklyn and
Queens for the first time since the storm flooded the tunnels under the
East River, the Times said.
Cuomo
said about 60 percent of those in New York who lost power had it back
by Saturday. On Long Island, however, more than half of the 1.2 million
homes and businesses affected by the storm were still in the dark.
"We are getting through it," Cuomo said at a news briefing. "The worst is behind us."
Gas
remained in short supply. Cuomo said 8 million gallons had been
delivered, with 28 million more expected from commercial sources and 12
million from the Defense Department.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and other top officials were to visit some of the worst-hit areas.
New
York Mayor Michael Bloomberg Friday announced the opening of the first
of several disaster assistance service centers that will provide
information about applying for emergency social and economic benefits.
All of the centers will be operated by the city's Human Resources
Administration in cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management
Agency and will be open seven days a week.
As
of Friday afternoon, more than 98,000 people in New Jersey, New York
and Connecticut had registered for federal assistance and more than $40
million in aid has been approved, a statement by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency said.
New York City inspectors are posting color-coded placards on buildings and homes to warn people not to enter some buildings.
"Let
me just reiterate what a red placard means: It is not a demolition
order; if you read carefully what's written on it, it says it's not a
demolition order. It is an order not to enter for your safety,"
Bloomberg said.
"A
yellow placard requires you to have a safety inspection before
entering. And I also want to emphasize that's just because water may be
out of the basement doesn't mean that it's safe to turn on electricity,
or a boiler, or a generator to power your home. It really is a
significant fire risk to do so.
"One
of the things that struck me was people kept thinking that if a
generator miraculously showed up in the neighborhood all would be OK.
That's just not the case. When all of the wiring is covered with water,
salt water in particular, you have to do a lot of work before you can
re-energize those lines. And so we've already seen some cases where when
electricity was turned on there were fires and we lost some other
houses. We want to make sure that does not happen."
The
number of residences and businesses without power as of Friday night
was 95,000 in Manhattan; 26,000 in the Bronx; 34,000 in Brooklyn; 84,000
in Queens and 48,000 in Staten Island, the New York Daily News
reported.
"Two
networks in Lower Manhattan will take a little longer to bring back
online," Bloomberg said. "However, even with crews working around the
clock, it's going to take a lot longer to bring power back to areas that
are served by overhead power lines -- and that includes the Long
Island Power Authority's more than 30,000 customers on the Rockaways."
In
New Jersey, Christie allowed Atlantic City casinos to reopen Friday.
Some did, and others said they would open during the weekend.
New
Jersey Transit began running trains on the Northeast Corridor between
Trenton and New York and said most buses were running again by Saturday
morning. Other rail lines remained shut down.
New
York City has 13 food distribution sites opened, staffed by National
Guard members, New York City Service volunteers and by the staff of the
Salvation Army. Since Thursday, they distributed about 290,000 meals
and nearly a half-million bottles of water, Bloomberg said.
"Goldman
Sachs, through its urban investment group, will match the $5 million
New York City is providing in funding for small businesses affected by
the hurricane," Bloomberg said. "These funds will be loaned to
businesses in Zone A and other areas where there have been power outages
and severe flooding.
Businesses
had contributed more than $33 million in donations to Sandy relief as
of early Friday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Business Civil Leadership
Center told CNNMoney.
About
2.7 million customers in 15 states and the District of Columbia were
without power Saturday, with at least some facing perhaps another week
before it is restored, CNN reported.
The
U.S. death toll from Hurricane Sandy rose Saturday, reaching 113, the
Los Angeles Times reported, up from 97 Friday. The newspaper said 48 of
the deaths were in New York, followed by New Jersey with 24,
Pennsylvania 14, Maryland 11, West Virginia seven and Connecticut four,
North Carolina two, Virginia two and New Hampshire one.
Residents
of many beach towns on the South Shore of Long Island were waiting for
power to be restored, and even for some sign someone was in charge,
The New York Times reported. Vikki Quinn's house in Long Beach was
flooded and her possessions were piled in the yard.
"I just keep waiting for someone with a megaphone and a car to just tell us what to do," she told the Times. "I'm lost."
President
Barack Obama convened a meeting of top emergency officials in
Washington, with Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo of New
York and Dannel Malloy of Connecticut joining by telephone.
White
House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters members of
the Cabinet reported on their meetings with local officials, first
responders and citizens, and the president spoke individually during the
meeting with the governors and local officials, asking whether there
are "additional federal resources that could be brought to bear to meet
some of the needs in their communities."
Earnest
said the president also got a briefing from the National Weather
Service on a storm forecast to reach the U.S. Northeast Wednesday.
Forecasters said the system could come with high winds, substantial
rainfall and perhaps cooler temperatures.
Lights
were back on Saturday in most of Manhattan. Subway trains began
running between Manhattan and the Long Island boroughs of Brooklyn and
Queens for the first time since the storm flooded the tunnels under the
East River, the Times said.
Cuomo
said about 60 percent of those in New York who lost power had it back
by Saturday. On Long Island, however, more than half of the 1.2 million
homes and businesses affected by the storm were still in the dark.
"We are getting through it," Cuomo said at a news briefing. "The worst is behind us."
Gas
remained in short supply. Cuomo said 8 million gallons had been
delivered, with 28 million more expected from commercial sources and 12
million from the Defense Department.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and other top officials were to visit some of the worst-hit areas.
New
York Mayor Michael Bloomberg Friday announced the opening of the first
of several disaster assistance service centers that will provide
information about applying for emergency social and economic benefits.
All of the centers will be operated by the city's Human Resources
Administration in cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management
Agency and will be open seven days a week.
As
of Friday afternoon, more than 98,000 people in New Jersey, New York
and Connecticut had registered for federal assistance and more than $40
million in aid has been approved, a statement by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency said.
New York City inspectors are posting color-coded placards on buildings and homes to warn people not to enter some buildings.
"Let
me just reiterate what a red placard means: It is not a demolition
order; if you read carefully what's written on it, it says it's not a
demolition order. It is an order not to enter for your safety,"
Bloomberg said.
"A
yellow placard requires you to have a safety inspection before
entering. And I also want to emphasize that's just because water may be
out of the basement doesn't mean that it's safe to turn on electricity,
or a boiler, or a generator to power your home. It really is a
significant fire risk to do so.
"One
of the things that struck me was people kept thinking that if a
generator miraculously showed up in the neighborhood all would be OK.
That's just not the case. When all of the wiring is covered with water,
salt water in particular, you have to do a lot of work before you can
re-energize those lines. And so we've already seen some cases where when
electricity was turned on there were fires and we lost some other
houses. We want to make sure that does not happen."
The
number of residences and businesses without power as of Friday night
was 95,000 in Manhattan; 26,000 in the Bronx; 34,000 in Brooklyn; 84,000
in Queens and 48,000 in Staten Island, the New York Daily News
reported.
"Two
networks in Lower Manhattan will take a little longer to bring back
online," Bloomberg said. "However, even with crews working around the
clock, it's going to take a lot longer to bring power back to areas that
are served by overhead power lines -- and that includes the Long
Island Power Authority's more than 30,000 customers on the Rockaways."
In
New Jersey, Christie allowed Atlantic City casinos to reopen Friday.
Some did, and others said they would open during the weekend.
New
Jersey Transit began running trains on the Northeast Corridor between
Trenton and New York and said most buses were running again by Saturday
morning. Other rail lines remained shut down.
New
York City has 13 food distribution sites opened, staffed by National
Guard members, New York City Service volunteers and by the staff of the
Salvation Army. Since Thursday, they distributed about 290,000 meals
and nearly a half-million bottles of water, Bloomberg said.
"Goldman
Sachs, through its urban investment group, will match the $5 million
New York City is providing in funding for small businesses affected by
the hurricane," Bloomberg said. "These funds will be loaned to
businesses in Zone A and other areas where there have been power outages
and severe flooding.
Businesses
had contributed more than $33 million in donations to Sandy relief as
of early Friday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Business Civil Leadership
Center told CNNMoney.
U.S. reverses stance on treaty to regulate arms trade
(Reuters)The
United States reversed policy on Wednesday and said it would back
launching talks on a treaty to regulate arms sales as long as the talks
operated by consensus, a stance critics said gave every nation a veto.
The decision, announced in a statement released by the U.S. State Department, overturns the position of former President George W. Bush's administration, which had opposed such a treaty on the grounds that national controls were better.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would support the talks as long as the negotiating forum, the so-called Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, "operates under the rules of consensus decision-making."
"Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the Treaty and to avoid loopholes in the Treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly," Clinton said in a written statement.
While praising the Obama administration's decision to overturn the Bush-era policy and to proceed with negotiations to regulate conventional arms sales, some groups criticized the U.S. insistence that decisions on the treaty be unanimous.
"The shift in position by the world's biggest arms exporter is a major breakthrough in launching formal negotiations at the United Nations in order to prevent irresponsible arms transfers," Amnesty International and Oxfam International said in a joint statement.
However, they said insisting that decisions on the treaty be made by consensus "could fatally weaken a final deal."
"Governments must resist US demands to give any single state the power to veto the treaty as this could hold the process hostage during the course of negotiations. We call on all governments to reject such a veto clause," said Oxfam International's policy adviser Debbie Hillier.
The proposed legally binding treaty would tighten regulation of, and set international standards for, the import, export and transfer of conventional weapons.
Supporters say it would give worldwide coverage to close gaps in existing regional and national arms export control systems that allow weapons to pass onto the illicit market.
Nations would remain in charge of their arms export control arrangements but would be legally obliged to assess each export against criteria agreed under the treaty. Governments would have to authorize transfers in writing and in advance.
The main opponent of the treaty in the past was the U.S. Bush administration, which said national controls were better. Last year, the United States accounted for more than two-thirds of some $55.2 billion in global arms transfer deals.
Arms exporters China, Russia and Israel abstained last year in a U.N. vote on the issue.
The proposed treaty is opposed by conservative U.S. think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which said last month that it would not restrict the access of "dictators and terrorists" to arms but would be used to reduce the ability of democracies such as Israel to defend their people.
The U.S. lobbying group the National Rifle Association has also opposed the treaty.
A resolution before the U.N. General Assembly is sponsored by seven nations including major arms exporter Britain. It calls for preparatory meetings in 2010 and 2011 for a conference to negotiate a treaty in 2012.
The decision, announced in a statement released by the U.S. State Department, overturns the position of former President George W. Bush's administration, which had opposed such a treaty on the grounds that national controls were better.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would support the talks as long as the negotiating forum, the so-called Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, "operates under the rules of consensus decision-making."
"Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the Treaty and to avoid loopholes in the Treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly," Clinton said in a written statement.
While praising the Obama administration's decision to overturn the Bush-era policy and to proceed with negotiations to regulate conventional arms sales, some groups criticized the U.S. insistence that decisions on the treaty be unanimous.
"The shift in position by the world's biggest arms exporter is a major breakthrough in launching formal negotiations at the United Nations in order to prevent irresponsible arms transfers," Amnesty International and Oxfam International said in a joint statement.
However, they said insisting that decisions on the treaty be made by consensus "could fatally weaken a final deal."
"Governments must resist US demands to give any single state the power to veto the treaty as this could hold the process hostage during the course of negotiations. We call on all governments to reject such a veto clause," said Oxfam International's policy adviser Debbie Hillier.
The proposed legally binding treaty would tighten regulation of, and set international standards for, the import, export and transfer of conventional weapons.
Supporters say it would give worldwide coverage to close gaps in existing regional and national arms export control systems that allow weapons to pass onto the illicit market.
Nations would remain in charge of their arms export control arrangements but would be legally obliged to assess each export against criteria agreed under the treaty. Governments would have to authorize transfers in writing and in advance.
The main opponent of the treaty in the past was the U.S. Bush administration, which said national controls were better. Last year, the United States accounted for more than two-thirds of some $55.2 billion in global arms transfer deals.
Arms exporters China, Russia and Israel abstained last year in a U.N. vote on the issue.
The proposed treaty is opposed by conservative U.S. think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which said last month that it would not restrict the access of "dictators and terrorists" to arms but would be used to reduce the ability of democracies such as Israel to defend their people.
The U.S. lobbying group the National Rifle Association has also opposed the treaty.
A resolution before the U.N. General Assembly is sponsored by seven nations including major arms exporter Britain. It calls for preparatory meetings in 2010 and 2011 for a conference to negotiate a treaty in 2012.
Making Mandarin Mandatory — in U.S. Kindergartens
Grant Blankenship/The Macon Telegraph, via Associated PressQiao
Yuan, a teacher from China, makes her way through a Wal-Mart checkout
line in Macon, Georgia. An instructor affiliated with the
Beijing-backed Confucius Institute, she teaches mandatory
Chinese-language lessons as part of a new curriculum in local public
schools.
nytimes/Bibb
County sits smack-dab in the center of Georgia, and 150 years ago it
was at the very center of the Confederacy. Its foundries supplied
weapons and ammunition to the rebel army, and no county supplied a
larger percentage of its men to the cause. Toward the end of the Civil
War, the only local men not carrying a musket for the South were elderly, blind or disabled.
Times are still tough in Bibb County. Some 20 percent of the
residents live below the poverty line, and its public schools are among
the lowest performing in the state. About half the kids don’t graduate
from high school.But the county has just embarked on a bold plan to have all its children fully bilingual — in English and Mandarin — by the time they graduate from high school. In recent weeks, children from pre-kindergarten through third grade began mandatory Mandarin classes, part of a curriculum that in three years will include middle school and high school students.
The new curriculum has had some pushback, to say the least, and the word communism has often been raised. Jane Drennan, a deputy superintendent, told a TV station in Macon, the county seat, that she and other school officials had heard from many parents who said, “I don’t want my kid learning Chinese.”
“I understand there may be some fears involved in moving a different culture into our community,” Ms. Drennan said. “People have concerns we won’t be teaching English as much, which is not true. This is an addition to our curriculum.”
Ms. Drennan said learning another language, whether it’s Chinese or French, “enhances your learning in everything else.”
“Bibb County is not known for producing the highest-achieving graduates,” Dina McDonald, a Macon resident and the mother of a ninth-grader, told NPR. “You’ll see that many of them can’t even speak basic English.”
“Do you want to teach them how to say, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ in Mandarin?”
A number of parents have asked why Spanish is not the default second language, especially with the increasing number of Hispanic residents in the county.
“My wife is a Latina, and so I fully understand,” said Mr. Dallemand, who was born in Haiti, adding a saying from Arthur C. Clarke: “It is important for communities to educate our children for their future, not our past.”
The new Mandarin teachers, about 25 in all, are being supplied by the Confucius Institute at Kennesaw State University, north of Atlanta. Hailing from mainland China, the teachers live in the local Bibb County communities, teach and work full-time at the schools and cost the district $16,000 each.
For the past three weeks, Jie Jiang has been teaching second-graders at Burdell-Hunt Elementary School in Macon. She told the Macon Telegraph that the “kids are really nice and they learn fast.” And the newspaper’s story described this classroom scene:
During Wednesday’s class, students practiced saying “good morning,” “good afternoon” and “good evening” aloud as Jiang held flashcards depicting different times of day.The Confucius Institutes, organized and financed by the Chinese government, are now located in about 70 colleges and universities in the United States, and there are a couple hundred more worldwide. Part of Beijing’s soft power efforts abroad, the institutes are often welcomed by host schools as ready-made Chinese-language departments.
“Now let’s see if you can write some Chinese,” Jiang said after the flashcard exercise. “This is a little difficult, but I think you can do it.”
On the board, Jiang wrote the characters for “good evening,” pronounced “wan shang hao.”
Second-grader Immanuel Hawkins volunteered for the task, writing his characters underneath Jiang’s and beaming when she congratulated him in Mandarin.
The first institute was set up at the University of Maryland, in 2004, and the program there has had “no interference and no pressure at all” from the Beijing government or the sponsoring school, Nankai University, according to the program director, Chuan Sheng Liu, a physics professor at Maryland.
My colleague D.D. Guttenplan reported in March on the controversy that sometimes surrounds the government-run Confucius Institutes:
To proponents, the institutes offer a chance for greater engagement with one of the oldest civilizations in the world — and the fastest-rising power of the new millennium. For cash-strapped university administrators, the institutes can seem like a godsend, bringing not just Beijing-trained and -financed language teachers and textbooks but also money for a director’s salary and a program of public events.
“When you set up a Confucius Institute you get a ready-made partner,” said Nick Byrne, executive director of the Confucius Institute at the London School of Economics, which is paired with Tsinghua University in Beijing. Tsinghua sends Chinese language teachers to London; the institute also funds a number of scholarships at Tsinghua for British graduate students.
Critics worry that such largess comes with strings attached.
“There is a whole list of proscribed topics,” said June Teufel Dreyer, who teaches Chinese government and foreign policy at the University of Miami. “You’re told not to discuss the Dalai Lama — or to invite the Dalai Lama to campus. Tibet, Taiwan, China’s military buildup, factional fights inside the Chinese leadership — these are all off limits.”
In a 2010 story in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ms. Dreyer said the institutes “perform a propaganda function.”
“It would be stupid,” she said, “for the Chinese government to spend money on something that did not further its interests.”
Monday, November 5, 2012
Was Obama Once an Indonesian Citizen? Here’s What We Found When We Went There Looking
Was Obama Once an Indonesian Citizen? Here’s What We Found When We Went There Looking
- Posted on November 5, 2012 at 7:51am by
Charles C.
As part of our series on President Obama’s education and past,
we interviewed Barack Obama’s first ever principal, Father Bart
Janssen. Our freelance correspondent, Charles C. Johnson, went all the
way to Indonesia to find out more about Obama’s past.
Editor’s note: Writer Charles C. Johnson will join TheBlaze Editor-in-Chief Scott Baker to talk about this story on today’s BlazeCast at 12pm ET. This post will be updated with the embed of that live broadcast.
–
Enrollment documents viewed by TheBlaze confirm that a young Barack Obama was listed as an Indonesian citizen and a Muslim on school registration in the 1960s. And while the document has been reported on before, albeit lightly, TheBlaze has compiled the most complete view thus far of the document and the circumstances surrounding it – including an interview with the president’s first-ever principal while he was in Indonesia.
TheBlaze repeatedly photographed the document in the office of the current headmaster of Santo Fransiskus Assisis, a Catholic school that Obama attended from January 1968 to December 1970 in Jakarta. The record shows that Obama (or his parents) – at least for the period of his life – claimed to be an Indonesian citizen, that he took the last name Soetoro (the last name of his step-father, Lolo), that his religion was listed as Islam, and that he was born in Honolulu.
Fastforward: Why the School Obama Attended After St. Fransiskus Is Just as Important
While Obama’s time at Santo Fransiskus is important (and we’ll explore it in more detail shortly), it’s just as crucial to fastforward to when Obama left the school.
According to records at Santo Fransiskus Assisis, Obama left after 1970 because his family moved. That move was due to Lolo leaving Dinas Topografi, a mapmaking survey company that contracted with the Indonesian army—which is listed in the document we viewed—to join Union Oil where he became a well-connected government liaison officer.
That job came with perks, among them access to some of the best schools for young Barry Soetoro. That’s evident by the young Obama attending Besuki School, one of the three best public schools in Indonesia, after leaving St. Fransiskus. Besuki School is the sort of place the connected send their children when they are not already sending them to the pricy international school. (This is an important detail because once Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, got a job working for the Ford Foundation in 1980, and after she had divorced Lolo Soetoro, she began sending her daughter, Maya, to Jakarta International School.)
In a taped interview in Indonesian and subsequent email with Akhmad Solikhin, Besuki’s current principal, he told my Indonesian translator and me that, other than Obama, there has only been one non-Indonesian at the school—a Dutch student. That’s not surprising considering Besuki School, founded in 1934, was formerly Carpentier Alting Stichting Nassau School — a school run and controlled by the Dutch for the Dutch colonialists and the Indonesian elite. In 1962 — before Obama attended in 1970 — it was taken over by the Indonesian government. Besuki was then and is now a prestigious place where potential students sit on waitlists. In fact, in 2007 Besuki began using a mandatory admissions test to try and cut down on the number of Indonesian children trying to get in.
Why is this all important? Because given that history, it doesn’t seem likely that the school would have wasted one of their prized seats on a student not claiming to be Indonesian, especially when it was the sort of place that educated the children of government officials and the well-to-do.
Could Obama Have Gone to a Public Indonesian School Without Claiming to Be a Citizen?
Thanks to the political instability in Indonesia that took place between 1965-1967, public records for the 1960s are spotty, at best, for all levels of government. Only the Catholic school Obama attended – St. Fransiskus — had any records to speak of regarding claims of citizenship.
Nevertheless, my Indonesian-born translator and I were able to speak with several government officials about the policy governing adoptions and foreign nationals attending public school. Was it possible that Obama could have gotten into Indonesian public schools without claiming to be an Indonesian citizen?
“It is extremely rare that non-Indonesians go to Indonesian public school,” Liperty Marpaum told us. He is a staff member of the department of Law & Labor (Hukum & Pegawaian), which handles education policies for the Indonesian government. Foreigners must apply and ask permission for the department of education before they may enroll and even must give a copy of their passport and reasons for wanting to go to school in the country. Most of the foreigners, he said, are Asians—Filipinos, Thai, and the like, not Europeans. And Americans? “No. All of the Americans go to international school.”
We searched for any such permission document Obama may have submitted to the department of education by Lolo Soetoro or Ann Dunham, but came up empty. We also could not find records at Besuki School, despite requests.
So how did Obama get in?
It has been a source of speculation for some time that Obama was adopted by Lolo Soetoro. It is always a possibility, and it could explain at least the citizenship claim on the school form. However, it’s important to not that even if Obama was adopted and became an Indonesian citizen, he would not have lost his American citizenship under existing constitutional law (see the Supreme Court case Perkins v. Elg). Indonesia then and now does not allow dual citizenship, but under American law he would not have lost his American citizenship until he reached the age of majority and chose himself to give it up.
(Think of it this way: Your parents cannot decide you are no longer a U.S. citizen if you are natural born. But if you make the decision yourself once old enough —join a foreign army, for example — you could very well lose your citizenship.)
Defenders of the president (and detractors of the adoption theory) point to a 1958 Indonesian law that says a child cannot be adopted if they are over five years old and that Barry and his mother arrived in August 1967—after he had turned six. But Lolo and Ann Dunham married on March 15, 1965, when Obama was three and half and Lolo left for Indonesia in June 1966 while Obama was still four, according to Washington Post editor David Maraniss’s book, “Barack Obama: The Story.” Soetoro, then, could easily have filled out adoption forms, possibly in advance of the Indonesian school year that begins in July, in preparation of his wife and stepson’s arrival. We know that Obama’s mother suddenly reversed her previous position that her husband’s departure to Indonesia would cause undue mental hardship (Maraniss, p. 201) so presumably she had settled on living in Indonesia with her husband and child. Under Indonesian law, when a man married a woman with children, the woman’s children become Indonesian nationals, as well.
Additionally, the way Maraniss describes the relationship between Obama and his stepfather is like it were an adoption. “Like his mother, Barry took the Soetoro name. He called Ann mamah and Lolo papah and did not flinch when Lolo introduced him as his son.” (Maraniss, p. 230) So complete was the view that Barack Obama was Barry Soetoro that Israel Darmawan, Obama’s first grade teacher at Fransiskus Assisis, did not recognize who he was, according to one account.
A History of Mistruths
While the current headmaster of Fransiskus Assisis did not know whose handwriting was on the form, she said it was safe to assume that the information on it was provided by Obama’s mother — his stepfather visited only rarely during the three years Obama attended school. That raises another theory: Could Ann Soetoro, who was said to have been very interested in her son’s education so much so that she tutored him in the morning, have lied or stretched the truth regarding her son’s status to help him get into Besuki school, the best school she could? If so, it wouldn’t be the last time that she did everything she could to have her son get the best possible education.
Maraniss describes Dunham as “tireless at working the system, even from afar” as one of the reasons Obama got into the elite Punahou prep school in Hawaii. Nor would it be the last time he and his family would lie about his origins. Indeed, Maraniss notes Obama came from a family of liars who told tall tales about his origins:
We also know from reports in the student newspaper that Occidental, which prides itself on its diversity and international relations focus, was trying to bring more minority students to campus at the time. Might Obama have tried to pass himself off as still more diverse? Could he even have lied to “seem more exotic” to an admissions officer at Occidental or Columbia?
Add all that to the fact that Obama embellished in his book, Dreams from My Father, as Maraniss has noted, and that TheBlaze has also revealed in the past he lied about a “transfer program” he describes between Occidental and Columbia in the same book (no such transfer program exists).
That raises the question: Were Obama’s parents lying when they told Fransiskus Assisis that he was an Indonesian citizen?
It’s hard to say, but the answers to such questions matter.
What the Founder of Obama’s Indonesian School Told Us
To find out more about Obama’s time in Indonesia, TheBlaze tracked down Father Bart Janssen. He’s the elderly founder of Santo Fransiskus Assisis who we found in a monastery in Den Bosch, The Netherlands. We asked him, through a Dutch translator, what he remembers of the young Barack Obama.
In the late 1960s, Janssen was sent by the Bishop of Jakarta to set up a church in the region, which at the time was a small village well beyond the city limits of Jakarta (though now sits practically in the middle of Jakarta due to the amazing growth of the city). And while his goal was a church, the school was a way to assimilate into the community.
“There were not Catholic churches or schools in that area at the time – it was quite remote, a little village, if you will. Offering a good education was a typical way to get the local people involved with the church and become part of the community,” Janssen told us.
The school started in February 1967 and attracted about 50 students in the first years: “It was quite a challenge in the beginning, especially to attract children and grow the school and the church in such a remote area, but it became a success after a few years.”
Obama was signed up for the school in 1968 as part of the second class of students entering the school. He was six years old at the time and attended first, second, and third grade there. Janssen doesn’t remember who registered Obama, but he recalls that Obama’s mother didn’t speak Indonesian at the time, so he thinks that both the stepfather and the mother would have been there together to register their son. He also doesn’t think the details in Obama’s registration document should be considered official declarations of his faith or citizenship because it wasn’t a government form and people played loose with such facts at the time. For example, it was typical to register as Indonesian and Islamic just because you were living there, so the religion indicated may just be what his father put down because it was the normal thing to do.
“That was just the norm,” Janssen explained.
It was, Janssen added however, well known that Obama was American and came to the school from Hawaii. And Janssen said he also had an understanding that Obama was raised Christian, though not Catholic, because his mother and natural father were known to be so. Janssen also said he knew that Obama’s birth father was from Kenya and that his mother was American.
And it wasn’t a requirement to be Indonesian or Catholic to attend the school. Things were loose in terms of citizenship requirements in Indonesia, Janssen recalled. He himself had Dutch citizenship when he first set up the school in 1967 and it wasn’t until 1982 that he changed his citizenship to Indonesian. He switched citizenship back to Dutch in 2005 when he returned to the Netherlands.
Obama at Age Six: I Want to Be President
Though Indonesian citizenship wasn’t required, courses were taught in Indonesian and Obama learned the language in three months. Father Janssen recalled that when Obama took his Indonesian speaking test for the school, the young student told the class that he wanted to be president some day.
“He said he would like to be president, but he didn’t say president of which country,” Janssen said. “It ‘s quite remarkable that he had that idea back then and now, in fact, he is president of the United States.”
While Father Janssen didn’t teach classes and has no direct recollection about Obama’s performance as a student, he said Obama’s teacher told him that Obama was a good student and received good grades.
“He learned Indonesian in 3 months, after all,” he said.
He added that Obama’s parents rented a house nearby so that their son could attend the school, and also remembers that Obama was quite a bit bigger than most other students there.
Obama wasn’t the only foreign student in the school, but Janssen doesn’t recall how many were Indonesian students and how many came from other countries. He said about half the students were Catholic and the rest were other religions, including many of Islamic faith.
“It wasn’t a requirement to be Catholic, but they would be taught Catholic principles and values.”
–
Where does all this leave us, then? Here’s what we know:
An exit after one term from the White House could act as a catalyst for more information more quickly. An Obama win, on the other hand, would likely keep any information – at least from the president himself — sealed for at least four more years.
Voters on Tuesday, then, may be deciding more than just who the next president is – they could help decide how much more we know about the one we have now.
Editor’s note: Writer Charles C. Johnson will join TheBlaze Editor-in-Chief Scott Baker to talk about this story on today’s BlazeCast at 12pm ET. This post will be updated with the embed of that live broadcast.
–
Enrollment documents viewed by TheBlaze confirm that a young Barack Obama was listed as an Indonesian citizen and a Muslim on school registration in the 1960s. And while the document has been reported on before, albeit lightly, TheBlaze has compiled the most complete view thus far of the document and the circumstances surrounding it – including an interview with the president’s first-ever principal while he was in Indonesia.
TheBlaze repeatedly photographed the document in the office of the current headmaster of Santo Fransiskus Assisis, a Catholic school that Obama attended from January 1968 to December 1970 in Jakarta. The record shows that Obama (or his parents) – at least for the period of his life – claimed to be an Indonesian citizen, that he took the last name Soetoro (the last name of his step-father, Lolo), that his religion was listed as Islam, and that he was born in Honolulu.
A picture of Obama’s school registration at
the Santo Fransiskus Assisis school in Jakarta, Indonesia. The first
line notes his name, the second line shows where he was born, the third
line notes his citizenship, and the sixth line shows religious
affiliation. (Photo: Charles Johnson/TheBlaze)
Another view of Obama’s school registration
at the Santo Fransiskus Assisis school in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Photo:
Charles Johnson/TheBlaze)
Arrows point to the relevant information on Obama’s school registration. (Photo: Charles Johnson/TheBlaze)
Fastforward: Why the School Obama Attended After St. Fransiskus Is Just as Important
While Obama’s time at Santo Fransiskus is important (and we’ll explore it in more detail shortly), it’s just as crucial to fastforward to when Obama left the school.
According to records at Santo Fransiskus Assisis, Obama left after 1970 because his family moved. That move was due to Lolo leaving Dinas Topografi, a mapmaking survey company that contracted with the Indonesian army—which is listed in the document we viewed—to join Union Oil where he became a well-connected government liaison officer.
That job came with perks, among them access to some of the best schools for young Barry Soetoro. That’s evident by the young Obama attending Besuki School, one of the three best public schools in Indonesia, after leaving St. Fransiskus. Besuki School is the sort of place the connected send their children when they are not already sending them to the pricy international school. (This is an important detail because once Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, got a job working for the Ford Foundation in 1980, and after she had divorced Lolo Soetoro, she began sending her daughter, Maya, to Jakarta International School.)
In a taped interview in Indonesian and subsequent email with Akhmad Solikhin, Besuki’s current principal, he told my Indonesian translator and me that, other than Obama, there has only been one non-Indonesian at the school—a Dutch student. That’s not surprising considering Besuki School, founded in 1934, was formerly Carpentier Alting Stichting Nassau School — a school run and controlled by the Dutch for the Dutch colonialists and the Indonesian elite. In 1962 — before Obama attended in 1970 — it was taken over by the Indonesian government. Besuki was then and is now a prestigious place where potential students sit on waitlists. In fact, in 2007 Besuki began using a mandatory admissions test to try and cut down on the number of Indonesian children trying to get in.
Why is this all important? Because given that history, it doesn’t seem likely that the school would have wasted one of their prized seats on a student not claiming to be Indonesian, especially when it was the sort of place that educated the children of government officials and the well-to-do.
The mosque located at the Besuki school in Indonesia. (Photo: Charles Johnson/TheBlaze)
Could Obama Have Gone to a Public Indonesian School Without Claiming to Be a Citizen?
Thanks to the political instability in Indonesia that took place between 1965-1967, public records for the 1960s are spotty, at best, for all levels of government. Only the Catholic school Obama attended – St. Fransiskus — had any records to speak of regarding claims of citizenship.
Nevertheless, my Indonesian-born translator and I were able to speak with several government officials about the policy governing adoptions and foreign nationals attending public school. Was it possible that Obama could have gotten into Indonesian public schools without claiming to be an Indonesian citizen?
“It is extremely rare that non-Indonesians go to Indonesian public school,” Liperty Marpaum told us. He is a staff member of the department of Law & Labor (Hukum & Pegawaian), which handles education policies for the Indonesian government. Foreigners must apply and ask permission for the department of education before they may enroll and even must give a copy of their passport and reasons for wanting to go to school in the country. Most of the foreigners, he said, are Asians—Filipinos, Thai, and the like, not Europeans. And Americans? “No. All of the Americans go to international school.”
We searched for any such permission document Obama may have submitted to the department of education by Lolo Soetoro or Ann Dunham, but came up empty. We also could not find records at Besuki School, despite requests.
So how did Obama get in?
It has been a source of speculation for some time that Obama was adopted by Lolo Soetoro. It is always a possibility, and it could explain at least the citizenship claim on the school form. However, it’s important to not that even if Obama was adopted and became an Indonesian citizen, he would not have lost his American citizenship under existing constitutional law (see the Supreme Court case Perkins v. Elg). Indonesia then and now does not allow dual citizenship, but under American law he would not have lost his American citizenship until he reached the age of majority and chose himself to give it up.
(Think of it this way: Your parents cannot decide you are no longer a U.S. citizen if you are natural born. But if you make the decision yourself once old enough —join a foreign army, for example — you could very well lose your citizenship.)
Defenders of the president (and detractors of the adoption theory) point to a 1958 Indonesian law that says a child cannot be adopted if they are over five years old and that Barry and his mother arrived in August 1967—after he had turned six. But Lolo and Ann Dunham married on March 15, 1965, when Obama was three and half and Lolo left for Indonesia in June 1966 while Obama was still four, according to Washington Post editor David Maraniss’s book, “Barack Obama: The Story.” Soetoro, then, could easily have filled out adoption forms, possibly in advance of the Indonesian school year that begins in July, in preparation of his wife and stepson’s arrival. We know that Obama’s mother suddenly reversed her previous position that her husband’s departure to Indonesia would cause undue mental hardship (Maraniss, p. 201) so presumably she had settled on living in Indonesia with her husband and child. Under Indonesian law, when a man married a woman with children, the woman’s children become Indonesian nationals, as well.
Additionally, the way Maraniss describes the relationship between Obama and his stepfather is like it were an adoption. “Like his mother, Barry took the Soetoro name. He called Ann mamah and Lolo papah and did not flinch when Lolo introduced him as his son.” (Maraniss, p. 230) So complete was the view that Barack Obama was Barry Soetoro that Israel Darmawan, Obama’s first grade teacher at Fransiskus Assisis, did not recognize who he was, according to one account.
A History of Mistruths
While the current headmaster of Fransiskus Assisis did not know whose handwriting was on the form, she said it was safe to assume that the information on it was provided by Obama’s mother — his stepfather visited only rarely during the three years Obama attended school. That raises another theory: Could Ann Soetoro, who was said to have been very interested in her son’s education so much so that she tutored him in the morning, have lied or stretched the truth regarding her son’s status to help him get into Besuki school, the best school she could? If so, it wouldn’t be the last time that she did everything she could to have her son get the best possible education.
Maraniss describes Dunham as “tireless at working the system, even from afar” as one of the reasons Obama got into the elite Punahou prep school in Hawaii. Nor would it be the last time he and his family would lie about his origins. Indeed, Maraniss notes Obama came from a family of liars who told tall tales about his origins:
“His grandfather [Stanley] had told strangers that the boy was a descendant of ali ‘i, native Hawaiian royalty. In Obama’s later memoir, he recalled boasting at Punahou that his father was an African prince. Some classmates remembered it differently, that first he claimed his father was an Indonesian prince.” (p. 268).Maraniss is most likely referring to Kirsten B. Caldwell, who wrote in a 2008 collection that Obama had told her and her sister that he was an Indonesian prince:
“My sister and I remember Barry bragging about his father being an Indonesian prince (in his book, Dreams From My Father, he recalls telling people his father was an African prince, but we tennis court kids remember it the other way). We didn’t know it, but at that point, he was a young boy who didn’t know his real father, and had been living in Indonesia with his mother, stepfather, and half-sister, and had recently moved to a small apartment in Honolulu to live with his grandparents in order to attend a highly acclaimed private school on scholarship. What a culture shock! I can certainly understand how a new kid would want to seem more exotic when he was likely feeling a little insecure. I just figured he was an Indonesian prince who would go back for his legacy after graduation.” (“Our Friend Barry,” p. 69) [Emphasis added]It doesn’t end there. Obama’s Occidental College classmate Amiekohel “Kim” Kimbrew of Los Angeles recalled rumors that Obama was a “Hawaiian prince” to the Chicago Tribune. (“Activism blossomed in college,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 2007).
We also know from reports in the student newspaper that Occidental, which prides itself on its diversity and international relations focus, was trying to bring more minority students to campus at the time. Might Obama have tried to pass himself off as still more diverse? Could he even have lied to “seem more exotic” to an admissions officer at Occidental or Columbia?
Add all that to the fact that Obama embellished in his book, Dreams from My Father, as Maraniss has noted, and that TheBlaze has also revealed in the past he lied about a “transfer program” he describes between Occidental and Columbia in the same book (no such transfer program exists).
That raises the question: Were Obama’s parents lying when they told Fransiskus Assisis that he was an Indonesian citizen?
It’s hard to say, but the answers to such questions matter.
Author Charles Johnson pictured in front of
Obama’s house in Menteng Dalam, luxurious by local standards at the
time. (Photo: Charles Johnson/TheBlaze)
To find out more about Obama’s time in Indonesia, TheBlaze tracked down Father Bart Janssen. He’s the elderly founder of Santo Fransiskus Assisis who we found in a monastery in Den Bosch, The Netherlands. We asked him, through a Dutch translator, what he remembers of the young Barack Obama.
In the late 1960s, Janssen was sent by the Bishop of Jakarta to set up a church in the region, which at the time was a small village well beyond the city limits of Jakarta (though now sits practically in the middle of Jakarta due to the amazing growth of the city). And while his goal was a church, the school was a way to assimilate into the community.
“There were not Catholic churches or schools in that area at the time – it was quite remote, a little village, if you will. Offering a good education was a typical way to get the local people involved with the church and become part of the community,” Janssen told us.
The school started in February 1967 and attracted about 50 students in the first years: “It was quite a challenge in the beginning, especially to attract children and grow the school and the church in such a remote area, but it became a success after a few years.”
Obama was signed up for the school in 1968 as part of the second class of students entering the school. He was six years old at the time and attended first, second, and third grade there. Janssen doesn’t remember who registered Obama, but he recalls that Obama’s mother didn’t speak Indonesian at the time, so he thinks that both the stepfather and the mother would have been there together to register their son. He also doesn’t think the details in Obama’s registration document should be considered official declarations of his faith or citizenship because it wasn’t a government form and people played loose with such facts at the time. For example, it was typical to register as Indonesian and Islamic just because you were living there, so the religion indicated may just be what his father put down because it was the normal thing to do.
“That was just the norm,” Janssen explained.
It was, Janssen added however, well known that Obama was American and came to the school from Hawaii. And Janssen said he also had an understanding that Obama was raised Christian, though not Catholic, because his mother and natural father were known to be so. Janssen also said he knew that Obama’s birth father was from Kenya and that his mother was American.
And it wasn’t a requirement to be Indonesian or Catholic to attend the school. Things were loose in terms of citizenship requirements in Indonesia, Janssen recalled. He himself had Dutch citizenship when he first set up the school in 1967 and it wasn’t until 1982 that he changed his citizenship to Indonesian. He switched citizenship back to Dutch in 2005 when he returned to the Netherlands.
Obama at Age Six: I Want to Be President
Though Indonesian citizenship wasn’t required, courses were taught in Indonesian and Obama learned the language in three months. Father Janssen recalled that when Obama took his Indonesian speaking test for the school, the young student told the class that he wanted to be president some day.
“He said he would like to be president, but he didn’t say president of which country,” Janssen said. “It ‘s quite remarkable that he had that idea back then and now, in fact, he is president of the United States.”
While Father Janssen didn’t teach classes and has no direct recollection about Obama’s performance as a student, he said Obama’s teacher told him that Obama was a good student and received good grades.
“He learned Indonesian in 3 months, after all,” he said.
He added that Obama’s parents rented a house nearby so that their son could attend the school, and also remembers that Obama was quite a bit bigger than most other students there.
Obama wasn’t the only foreign student in the school, but Janssen doesn’t recall how many were Indonesian students and how many came from other countries. He said about half the students were Catholic and the rest were other religions, including many of Islamic faith.
“It wasn’t a requirement to be Catholic, but they would be taught Catholic principles and values.”
–
Where does all this leave us, then? Here’s what we know:
- The document for the first-ever school Obama attended in Indonesia lists him as an Indonesian citizen (born in Hawaii) and a Muslim.
- Those claims would have benefited a young Obama as he continued his schooling.
- The Catholic priest who started the school, however, says it was not odd to lie about such things.
- We know that Obama and his family have a history of mistruths.
- But it’s also not far-fetched to consider that Obama’s step-father, Lolo, could have adopted him – thus making him an Indonesian citizen as a young boy.
- Even if he was adopted and was an Indonesian citizen at one time, though, it would not have affected his status as a U.S. citizen per the Supreme Court.
An exit after one term from the White House could act as a catalyst for more information more quickly. An Obama win, on the other hand, would likely keep any information – at least from the president himself — sealed for at least four more years.
Voters on Tuesday, then, may be deciding more than just who the next president is – they could help decide how much more we know about the one we have now.
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