Indonesia rejects U.S. concerns on airing Hezbollah TV

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia dismissed on Thursday U.S. concerns over the broadcasting of a Lebanese television channel backed by Hezbollah via a satellite owned by a telecommunications firm in the Southeast Asian country.

The al-Manar channel signed a three-year deal with the firm, PT Indosat Tbk, in April to use the satellite that can beam to Southeast Asia and China, company spokeswoman Adita Irawati said.

The U.S. embassy has "shared its concerns regarding al-Manar's continued broadcasts in Indonesia," Tristram Perry, a spokesman for the embassy in Jakarta, said in an email.

He said the concerns were based on al-Manar and Hezbollah being designated terrorist entities under U.S. Law and because of al-Manar's record of broadcasts designed to incite violence.

Sasa Djuarsa Sendjaja, the head of the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission, said the broadcasts were not a threat to the national interest or security.

"We are also monitoring its contents and it's good to have a balance of news from America and the West," he said, adding that the broadcasts could only be seen with a satellite dish, representing less than one percent of the 226 million people in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country.

Indonesia's information and communications minister, Mohammad Nuh, said that the government had no right to categorize a television channel as a terrorist network.

"Al-Manar is similar to Al Jazeera, BBC and CNN, they are television broadcasters," the minister was quoted by the state Antara news agency as saying.

(Reporting by Telly Nathalia; Editing by Ed Davies and David Fox)