Jakarta – The authorities in the Indonesian capital have refused to halt a wave of forced evictions of Jakarta's poor, which has left almost 50,000 people homeless in the past year, a welfare activist said.

"We had our fifth meeting with city authorities on Wednesday, and they reneged on an earlier verbal agreement to sign a moratorium on the evictions," Father Sudrianto, the coordinator of the Anti Eviction Network, said.

A series of evictions and demolitions of slums along the city's fetid canals have destroyed the homes of 48,870 poor people in the past 12 months, according to the priest.

"The authorities bring in hired thugs, civilian guards, police and soldiers to burn and flatten the homes using bulldozers and hammers," he said.

The priest and several welfare and human rights organisations have been lobbying Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso and local councils – in vain – to stop the evictions.

"If the new agreement is designed to stop evictions, then I cannot sign it," the governor said.

Father Sudrianto said the mayor of north Jakarta, where a series of forced evictions since October have destroyed more than 8,000 homes housing 32,000 people, also refused to sign the moratorium.

In the latest raid, 2,000 people were forced from 400 homes on the banks of the Pejaringan canal on Monday. One official was quoted as saying the aim is to normalise the working of the canal, which is designed to carry away floodwater.

In some cases, compensation is paid to the squatters. But Father Sudrianto said no alternative housing has ever been offered to those evicted.

"The government has only one attitude, and that is that these settlements are illegal, and there is only one way out: to burn them, demolish them, evict the people. The authorities see no other way," he said.

The residents of the slums fall into three categories: commuters who travel between their home villages and Jakarta; refugees who have no homes to return to; and 'citizens without rights' whose families have been living in the slums since before 1939.

"Their families were living there before the Republic of Indonesia existed," the priest said. Many rebuild shacks on the site of their demolished homes.

"Some families along Pejaringan have been evicted three or four times," he said. "The squatters have no money to rent houses. Most of them have nowhere else to go. They just keep moving or rebuilding."

The city administration has also been trying to evict pedicab drivers, who have been outlawed since 1988 due to worsening traffic jams. In August last year, violence broke out over Jakarta's attempts to raid pedicab drivers.

Hundreds of angry pedicab drivers, aided by crowds of people, armed themselves with Molotov cocktails, machetes, steel bars and stones and attacked city officials who were enforcing the pedicab ban. One officer died while two others were injured in the incident.