Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said on Friday that she had expressed her disappointment to US representatives over an offensive cartoon published in American media.
“Yesterday, I met with US congress members […] and I spoke to them about this cartoon issue,” Retno said, as quoted by tribunnews.com
Earlier this month, a US newspaper published a cartoon depicting the Indonesian women’s beach volleyball team as apes, with the title “Indonesia wins the World Cup in beach volleyball again”.
Apart from being offensive, Retno said that the cartoon was not based on any facts at all.
“I told them […] we didn’t participate in the competition. That’s part of the reason why we think it weird that the cartoon was published. It is wrong,” Rerto said, as quoted by tribunnews.com.
She suggested an inter-personal approach to building mutual respect to avoid cases such as this reoccurring in the future.
“This carton is proof that we need to encourage people-to-people contact to foster respect for one another,” Retno said.
The carton was created by Danish artistic duo Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler. Their comic strip ‘WuMo’ is quite popular in Europe and in the US. Originally, it was published in newspapers across Europe, including Die Welt in Germany and Norway’s Dagblated.
The web’s largest catalog of newspaper comic strips, GoComics, states that Wumo has appeared in numerous US newspapers since 2013, including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe.
The Jakarta Post
