Jakarta – Around 35,000 families here would be left homeless if the Jakarta administration continued with the controversial demolition of slum areas across the capital, including those along the city's riverbanks, an activist said on Wednesday.
Azas Tigor Nainggolan from the Jakarta People's Forum (Fakta) said his group's records indicated that 7,000 families had become victims of the demolitions carried out over the past few weeks. "If the forced evictions continue, we estimate the number will be five times larger," he told The Jakarta Post.
The forced evictions were usually carried out by administration officials, with back up from the police. In some cases, residents complained that the officials did not give any advance warning of the demolitions and suddenly appeared with bulldozers to destroy their semi-permanent houses.
Nainggolan deplored the administration's methods of forcing people to leave the affected areas, saying that with forced evictions, not only did people lose their homes, but their children also had to leave schools. "The people don't want much. They just want to be heard and to be given a chance to live here [in Jakarta]," Nainggolan said.
He was speaking on the sidelines of a rally outside the City Council building. The protest involved some 60 people, including, among others, becak (pedicab) drivers, victims of the evictions and street vendors.
Fakta demanded that the administration revoke the 11/1988 regulation on public order. "It has been proven that the public order officials often use repressive approaches and resort to violence in dealing with the public," Nainggolan said.
During the rally, the protesters carried two white monkeys and a toy gorilla which bore the words "makananku 3,2 milyar rupiah (my meal costs 3.2 billion rupiah). They were apparently designed to mock the city administration, which had allocated 3.2 billion rupiah a year for the care of four apes that were scheduled to arrive in the capital soon.
In a statement they distributed to passersby, Fakta stated that in the last four months, the city administration had ruined the livelihoods of 6,000 becak drivers and 2,700 street vendors, and made 6,774 families homeless.
City councillors said they regretted the city administration's approach to the evictions, but did not offer any concrete solutions to the problem.
In a related development, the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) recommended a 100-day moratorium on all forced evictions conducted by the city administration against poor Jakartans and on housing demolitions, which wereconsidered to be violations of the resolution of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights on people's housing rights.
Saparinah Sadli, the commission's chairwoman, said that during the moratorium, it was expected the administration could build a constructive dialog that would cover all aspects of problems affecting the city's poor.
The commission also urged the establishment of a working group to review the laws and regulations issued by the city administration that were considered discriminatory toward the poor.