Edward Alden, Jakarta - On one side of the lagoon, Arie, his wife and two children live in a tiny shack of scrap wood and rusting corrugated iron, perched on stilts above canals choked with plastic bottles and tin cans. On the other side is what Arie calls "Miami," and to the people of Muara Baru it might as well be across the world, rather than just across the pond.

"Miami" is a gated community of plush condominiums, swimming pools and satellite dishes, where young girls dress in the starched skirts and pressed white shirts of private school uniforms. The cheapest homes sell for 350 million rupiah, about $180,000. If the Indonesian government has its way, Arie and the 30,000 people in Muara Baru will soon be evicted and their homes demolished to make way for another Miami, part of a massive waterfront reclamation and redevelopment project headed by Indonesian President Suharto's youngest daughter. They have been offered $12 a square metre, about $120 a house, for land that is worth probably 100 times that much. The cost of even a modest new home in Jakarta is $15,000 minimum. The only possible reprieve, local government officials have told them, is if the district votes 90 per cent in favor of the ruling, army-backed Golkar party in Thursday's election. "If the people don't vote for Golkar, I will have a big problem," said Hamid, one of the community's leaders.

The plight facing Muara Baru is not unusual in Indonesia. Land rights issues are second only to wage issues in the cases appearing before the country's quasi-independent human rights commission. More than 250 people have been camped on the commission's doorstep since their shanties were demolished April 17. In a country that has enjoyed growth rates between six and seven per cent for almost 25 years – in part, most observers say, because of the relative stability brought by authoritarian military rule – development pressures are constantly encroaching on the poorest people.

Since the early 1980s, there has been a boom in Jakarta's real estate market, with office buildings, luxury apartments and huge shopping malls sprouting across the city. Total office space in Jakarta grew from 345,000 square metres in 1980 to 2.5 million square metres in 1994. Development has transformed the face of Jakarta, and few would complain about the changes.

Even in the shanty towns, the poor are not eager to save their hovels. But without some compensation, they have nowhere else to go. In most cases, the Indonesian government has simply moved aside the residents and bulldozed their homes to make way for new buildings. While there are no figures kept on how many people have been forced out with little or no compensation, it probably numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

But Arie and Muara Baru's leaders are doing something unthinkable in Indonesia a decade ago: they are fighting back. With a local lawyer's support, they have challenged the Suharto regime in court, demanding fair compensation for their homes. And, they warn, if the army tries to force them out, they will not go without a fight. "For the first time, these people have the courage to protest," said M.S. Zulkarnaen, the former president of WALHI, an Indonesian environmental organization. "Since the late 1980s, most of these communities have become well organized, with lawyers and their own institutions. This is a new phenomenon for Jakarta." And that phenomenon is, in no small part, the result of support from countries like Canada. When Canadian eyes turn to Indonesia these days, they see gold, oil, gas and a booming economy that generated almost $3 billion in potential business deals during Prime Minister Jean Chretien's Team Canada mission last year.

But the new resistance in places like Muara Baru is as much the creation of Canada's involvement in Indonesia as the business deals the prime minister brought home. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Canada, largely through the Canadian International Development Agency, was one of the key countries supporting non-governmental organizations and helping train the lawyers and social activists who now try to defend the rights of the vast, poor majority of Indonesia's population of 180 million. In the jargon of the development agencies, Canada has helped to foster "the creation of civil society" in Indonesia. But does Canada now have the courage to support its own creation? While the Indonesian government is looking to Canada for investment, Arie and his people are looking to Canada to help them save the only homes they know. Arie has taught himself several languages, including English, in an effort to bring their story to the world. "We need help," he says. "Where is the World Bank, where is UNESCO, where is Canada?" If the army destroys their homes, he says, "the world will know what happened." Asmara Nababan, executive director of INFID, one of the country's more influential non-governmental organizations, thinks Canada is losing its nerve. "We think that Canada can play a significant role in supporting change and democracy in Indonesia," he said. "But they are very cautious towards our government. They don't like to make public statements on human rights."

Canadian support for nongovernmental organization, he says, has been drying up at the same time CIDA is pumping more than $4 million a year into loans for Canadian companies exploring business opportunities in Indonesia. "They have a lot of economic interests in Indonesia and they don't want to embarrass the Indonesian government," said Nababan. Canadian support for communities like Muara Baru would clearly not please the government. Even if the people there believed the Suharto regime might change its mind - which they don't - they have no intention of voting for Golkar, says Hamid, a retired soldier. The fight to save their community has turned them into supporters of deposed opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri. Most will express that opposition the only way they can, by spoiling their ballots. Canadians are accustomed to using the courts to defend their rights; in Indonesia, demanding just compensation for expropriation carries grave risks. Haji Soenardi, the lawyer working on behalf of Muara Baru, spent three years in jail in the early 1980s for opposing Suharto. Adnan Buyang Nasution, who founded the Legal Aid Institute - a team of lawyers that defends many of those facing dispossession - was also jailed in the 1970s. Still, the communities are not powerless. Soenardi's efforts on behalf of Muara Baru have tied the case up in court for more than six years. While he admits he has never won a case of this type before the Indonesian courts, every day of delay works in the community's favor. "If [the government] can't do something in one day, they will pull back and try to negotiate," he said. "And the longer the delay, the more expensive the land gets." Perhaps, he says, the government will decide it's better to pay fair compensation than to risk an uprising by bringing in the army. In addition, Zulkarnaen and WALHI sued the Indonesian government to force it to do an environmental impact assessment on the north Jakarta waterfront redevelopment project. The project will remain on hold until the assessment is completed. The Indonesian government agency that does environment assessments, known as BAPADEL, was first established through a CIDA grant. Zulkarnaen says the government and the army are growing increasingly wary of simply bringing in the bulldozers and risking open confrontations with the people. But there are other ways. Last year, one corner of Muara Baru mysteriously burned down in a fire that started in a newly established restaurant. The army immediately moved in with wire fences and signs warning that the land was now claimed by the government. The restaurant owner was never seen again. Zulkarnaen figures Muara Baru is safe until at least next spring, when the turmoil from this month's violent election campaign has waned and foreign investors begin to warm up again to Indonesia. But he says international attention and assistance are crucial. The NGOs themselves are under mounting pressure, facing a government crackdown in the runup to the election. In a recent letter to World Bank president James Wolfensohn, Nababan of INFID said the failure of the bank and western countries to speak out on human rights and to support the NGOs simply strengthens the Suharto regime's efforts to suppress any dissent. "Doing nothing or keeping silent can very well represent an act of taking sides in a political playing field," he wrote. Will Canada be among those countries supporting people like those in Muara Baru? Joel Ornoy of the Indonesian-Canadian Alliance, a coalition of Canadian NGOs supporting their counterparts in Indonesia, is not optimistic. "Canada's reputation has taken a bit of a beating for more being more interested in trade and investment than in real grassroots community work," he said. "The government has said very clearly that Canada's emphasis is changing from community links to trade links." "There's very little doubt left about where the emphasis is taking place."