Top U.S. imagemaker to visit RI and Malaysia
Top U.S. imagemaker to visit RI and Malaysia
Agence France-Presse, Washington
Karen Hughes, a close confidante of President George W. Bush and the State Department's top imagemaker, will visit Indonesia and Malaysia next week (this week) after her recent Middle East tour, she said on Friday.
Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, announced her Asian swing at a seminar here and said missions to Latin America and Europe were in the works.
"I'm headed on another listening trip. Next week (this week), I'm off to Indonesia and Malaysia," she told the Forum for Public Diplomacy held at George Washington University.
The State Department said she would kick off the four-day journey to the Asian Muslim countries on Thursday, visiting Jakarta, the tsunami-battered Indonesian province of Aceh and Kuala Lumpur.
It said she would meet with senior government officials, students, non-governmental organizations and attend several Ramadhan holiday Iftaar dinners "to hear their views and to discuss common interests and challenges."
Hughes will also view reconstruction efforts in Aceh, where 131,000 people were killed by the Dec. 26 tsunami that devastated countries around the Indian Ocean.
She will return through Hawaii and speak at an Oct. 25 conference of U.S. mission chiefs and public affairs officers from the Asia and Pacific region.
Hughes was sworn in a month ago and given the delicate job of polishing the United States's global image that has taken a battering in the Muslim world and elsewhere over the Iraq war and other disputes.
She quickly embarked on what she called a "listening tour" of the Middle East, but acknowledged on Friday that her job encompassed more than the Arab world.
"I am very much cognizant of the need to pay attention to the wider world. And, particularly living in Texas, I see a lot from Latin America of the rise of anti-Americanism that's being promoted by certain parties there," she said.
Hughes said she was planning to travel to Latin America "for one of my early trips," but gave no dates. She said a mission to Europe would be scheduled "in the months ahead."
Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Hughes' travels to Indonesia and Malaysia were part of efforts "to reach out and participate in a dialog with countries and peoples who are important to the United States."
"I think it builds on her experience on the last trip," Ereli said. "And I think it's part of a continuing effort to get out there and see what the reality is in the field as far as perceptions of the United States are."