Singapore – About 100 armed protestors have withdrawn from a power plant they illegally occupied at a Singapore-managed industrial park on Indonesia's Bintan island as part of a truce over land compensation claims, officials said Thursday.
Nearly all the 27 tenants had resumed operations after work was suspended due to the tense situation since the weekend, when hundreds of villagers waving knives and spears stormed the plant and cut off power and the water supply. Singapore conglomerate SembCorp Industries Ltd., whose unit SembCorp Parks Management runs the Bintan Industrial Park, said in a statement Thursday that all the protesters had left the plant and the park.
Indonesian police and military personnel had moved into the power plant to guard the facility, it said.
The protestors on Wednesday threatened to tear down the park in their campaign to demand more money for land that was sold in 1991 to Indonesia's Salim Group, the largest shareholder in the industrial estate.
Bintan, about 50 kilometres east of here, is a popular weekend resort for Singaporeans who also hold the lion's share of the 1.35 billion-Singapore-dollar (808-million-US) investments on the tiny island.
Listed SembCorp Industries, whose shares on Wednesday slumped to a four-month low in a knee-jerk reaction to the Bintan dispute, said it had "strongly requested the regional government to protect the people and assets in the industrial estate and they have agreed to do so."
A spokesman for SembCorp Parks Management told AFP that a circular had been sent to the tenants to resume production.
But the spokesman repeated an earlier warning that the park would be closed if it was not operationally safe.
"Although the situation has returned to normal, our earlier statement stands – that the park will be closed if the situation went out of hand in an extreme case," the spokesman said. Talks between the disgruntled villagers and local Indonesian government officials reportedly collapsed on Wednesday but the protestors were taking their case to Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, Singapore newspapers reported.
Ignatius Toka Solly, a student leader and spokesman for the protesters, was quoted as saying that the villagers would wait for three days for an outcome.
"If we do not get what we want, the people will take over and we will occupy the land using whatever means we can," the Straits Times daily reported him saying.
The villagers were reportedly paid 100 rupiah per square metre and now want 10,000 rupiah (1.37 US dollar). The 27 tenants in the 4,000-hectare (9,880-acre) had committed a total of 213 million US dollars in investments by end-1999, and employ about 9,600 workers.
"We have been told that the situation is slowly returning to normal with the mobsters having left the power station," Raymond Choy, managing director of Singapore-based German Plastic Technology, a tenant at the park, told AFP.
Other tenants said Indonesian authorities had stepped up security around the industrial park and Bintan Beach International Resort.
The villagers are unhappy with the money given to them for sale of land for both the beach resort and industrial park.
The Bintan problem cropped up just as Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong returned at the weekend from Jakarta after an investment mission aimed at helping Jakarta woo back foreign capital crucial for economic recovery.
The Singapore leader, who led a 60-strong delegation of Singapore-based local and foreign businessmen, had announced a 1.2 billion-dollar plan to help Indonesia attract foreign investments and accelerate economic growth.