A statue of Barack Obama as a boy was installed Sunday at the Indonesian primary school that the US president attended in the late 1960s in the capital Jakarta.

The two-meter bronze statue was placed in the compound of Menteng One school after it was removed from a nearby park last Sunday, vice-principal Akhmad Solikhin told AFP.

"We put the statue near the entrance gate of the school so everyone can see it when they pass by," Solikhin said.

"The costs of removing the statue from the park to putting it up again at the school were 30 million ($3,200) to 40 million rupiah," Solikhin added.

More than 57,000 people had joined a page on the social networking website Facebook calling for the statue to be removed from the park and replaced by a memorial to an Indonesian figure.

But Ron Mullers, chairman of the group Friends of Obama, which paid for the statue, said the move was not a response to those objections.

"We feel the school is the best place to be ... because this was where he went to school and this is a memory for him," he said.

The statue of "Little Barry" – as Obama was known to his Indonesian school friends – was designed by Indonesian artists and depicts the boy Obama dressed in shorts and a T-shirt with a butterfly perched on his hand.

Obama lived for four years as a child in Jakarta from 1967 after his divorced mother married an Indonesian.

The White House announced in early February that Obama and his family will visit Indonesia in March.

The trip has been eagerly awaited in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country since Obama's inauguration, which has been wel-comed in Indonesia as the start of a new era in US diplomacy.

AFP