113 Cianjur farmers detained by police following clash
113 Cianjur farmers detained by police following clash
JAKARTA (JP): Following a riot involving hundreds of farmers
in the Agrabinta district of Cianjur, West Java, police arrested
113 farmers and three student activists, Antara reported on
Saturday.
Police seized a number of swords, axes and machetes.
In the past week, police said, the farmers have been involved
in the destruction of thousands of cocoa plants and coconut
hybrids belonging to the Agrabinta state-run Nusantara estate.
Four houses belonging to estate workers were set on fire, as
well as two copra plants and three warehouses.
Cianjur Police said they had four suspects.
The students being questioned are Mulyana of the West Java
Farmers' Union, Iwan of the Padjadjaran University in Bandung and
Karnaen of the Suryakancana Academy in Cianjur.
On Thursday, thousands of farmers staged a protest at the
district office. They came from the villages of Rawasari,
Warnasari, Bojongkaso, Sukamanah, Pusakasari and Jatisari. They
demanded that the district head return land now under the control
of the state-run plantations to them immediately.
Elsewhere in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Police chief Col.
Chaerul Rasyid Rasyidi said no ethnic group had the right to
drive any other community out from their surroundings.
Ethnic groups in West Kalimantan stated last month that they
could no longer live with the migrant Madurese, citing
incompatible cultures. Some 200 residents, mainly Madurese, were
killed in ethnic clashes in Sambas regency.
It should be admitted, Chaerul told a gathering in which the
Forum of Harmony was set up, that not all members of an ethnic
group could be in the wrong.
The carnage has resulted in 20,000 refugees. Chaerul added
28,000 residents have armed themselves out of fear.
In Ujungpandang, the South Sulawesi capital, a bomb threat
forced Hasanuddin University rector Radi A. Gany and hundreds of
his staff to flee their eight-story building on Saturday. A local
police bomb squad was summoned but it found no explosives that an
unidentified caller said were planted somewhere in the building.
Chief of Ujungpandang Police Col. Jusuf Manggabarani said
police had been busy the past two weeks with a series of bomb
threats which turned out to be hoaxes. "But we have never taken
them lightly. We are investigating the motives behind the
threats," he told The Jakarta Post.
Apart from the university, a number of hotels, mosques,
churches, hospitals and schools have been targets of bomb
threats. (27/anr)