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 Foreign Ministry official said.

Imron Cotan, Indonesia’s No 2 Foreign Ministry bureaucrat, told a parliamentary committee that the problem lies not with his own diplomats but with attaches 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 today reported Cotan telling a parliamentary 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,” Cotan added.

Sick leave was the favourite excuse for missing such meetings, Cotan said. He did not give an estimate of how many attaches had substandard English.

Cotan - who has represented Indonesia in New York, Geneva and Australia - suggested that all attache candidates pass a written test in English, which is an international language of diplomacy.

Most Indonesians speak Bahasa Indonesia, the official language in a country that also has hundreds of other dialects.

English is a compulsory part of the public school curriculum but the language is rarely heard and few Indonesians are proficient.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizahsyah today confirmed the newspaper report, but declined to identify which of Indonesia’s 119 embassies had been affected by the language deficiencies.