JAKARTA, INDONESIA — The last time Indonesia allowed 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.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is scheduled to visit Indonesia on Wednesday and Thursday during her first overseas trip in her new position. In a written reply to questions during her Senate confirmation hearing last month, Clinton said she wanted to restart the Peace Corps program here.
Clinton may think that sending aid workers to Indonesian villages is a good use of "smart power" that would include "the full range of tools at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural," as she told the senators.
But she must be careful not to stir up resentments by pushing a mainly symbolic move, said Theodore Friend, an American expert on Indonesia.
"I think there is a slight to medium risk of inferred condescension," Friend said by telephone from Pennsylvania, where he is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute think tank.
The reaction, he said, might be, "You still think of us as backward, developmentally retarded or something," because Indonesian officials would prefer to talk about matters such as the global financial crisis. Many Indonesians hope Clinton will lay the groundwork for a visit by Obama, who lived in Jakarta from 1967 to 1971.
Obama still speaks some Bahasa Indonesia, the local language. And he may have picked up an appreciation for development work from his late mother, Ann, who returned to Indonesia in the 1980s to research her doctoral thesis. She worked with the Ford Foundation to help set up a program that made very small loans to the poor who wanted to start a business. Today the effort is heralded as one the world's first and most successful microfinance programs.
