US singer Kelly Clarkson said yesterday she was not aware a tobacco company was sponsoring her concert in Indonesia and refused to cancel the show despite appeals from anti-smoking groups.
In a statement on her blog headlined “Jakarta mishap,” the former American Idol winner said she was being “used as some kind of political pawn” and rejected criticism she was promoting smoking to her young fans.
“So ... my morning began with finding out that I am all over billboards, TV ads and other media formats alongside a tobacco company who unbeknownst to me is sponsoring my Jakarta date on my current tour,” she wrote. “I was not made aware of this and am in no way an advocate or an ambassador for youth smoking. I’m not even a smoker, nor have I ever been.”
She said her “only option” was to cancel the show, but she could not justify “penalizing my fans for someone else’s oversight.”
“This is a lose-lose situation for me and I am not happy about it, but the damage has been done and I refuse to cancel on my fans,” she said. “I think the hardest part of situations like this is getting personally attacked for something I was completely unaware of and being used as some kind of political pawn.”
The pop singer, who will perform in the Indonesian capital on April 29, has appeared on billboards and television ads beneath a prominent cigarette brand logo.
Clarkson made no mention of what she would do about the tobacco marketing, but concert promoter Adrie Subono said the show would go ahead without the cigarette company’s sponsorship.
“The show will go on without LA Lights as the sponsor,” he said, referring to a cigarette brand belonging to local producer PT Djarum.
He declined to say whether Clarkson had dropped Djarum or if the company, Indonesia’s third-biggest tobacco firm, had pulled out voluntarily.
“Many parties are involved ... there was consultation with the sponsor, [Clarkson’s] agent and our management, among others. The decision is not solely ours,” he said.
At least one billboard in the town of Bogor, outside Jakarta, was taken down yesterday and the cigarette logo no longer appeared in connection with Clarkson material on the promoter’s Web site.
The tobacco sponsorship has been condemned by the Indonesian National Commission on Child Protection, the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and an Indonesian Muslim organization.
Most fans commenting on Clarkson’s Web site expressed unconditional support, but some urged her to follow the example of Alicia Keys, who found herself in a similar predicament in Indonesia two years ago.
The Grammy award winner went on with the show, but dropped the cigarette sponsorship and apologized unequivocally to her supporters.
According to WHO statistics, Indonesia is a booming market for tobacco companies. Cigarette consumption in the Southeast Asian archipelago of 234 million people soared 47 percent in the 1990s.
Almost 70 percent of men over 20 years of age smoke and regular smoking among boys aged 15 to 19 increased from 36.8 percent in 1997 to 42.6 percent in 2000.
Commission for Indonesian Child Protection head Hadi Supeno urged the government to ban all tobacco advertising including sponsorships.
Some tobacco-sponsored events required people to buy cigarettes instead of tickets, child protection official Heru Kasidi said.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS