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MEETINGS SKIPPED BECAUSE OF BAD ENGLISH
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JAKARTA - Some Indonesian envoys based in embassies abroad are so weak in English language skills that they take sick leave to avoid meeting foreign officials, a senior Indonesian official said.
Mr Imron Cotan, the No 2 Foreign Ministry official, told a parliamentary committee that the problem lies not with his own diplomats, but with attachs sent to embassies by other ministries including defence, trade and finance.
"I found that a number of our attaches are not fluent in English," The Jakarta Post newspaper reported Mr Cotan telling the committee investigating the performance of Indonesian diplomats.
"Every time their counterparts from the home government want to meet them, they freak out and seek ways to avoid the meetings," he added.
Sick leave was the favourite excuse for missing such meetings, Mr Cotan said. He did not give an estimate of how many attachs had substandard English.
Mr Cotan - who has represented Indonesia in New York, Geneva and Australia - suggested that all attach candidates pass a written test in English.
Most Indonesians speak Bahasa Indonesia, the official language in a country that also has hundreds of other dialects. Though English is a compulsory part of the public school curriculum, most Indonesians are not proficient in it.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizahsyah declined to identify which of the 119 embassies had been affected by the language deficiencies. He said his ministry was not responsible for the language skills of attachs sent by other departments. AP
From TODAY, Friday, 19-Feb-2010
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