Bekasi marks 46th birthday
Bekasi marks 46th birthday
By Kosasih Derajat
BEKASI, West Java (JP): Bekasi, a suburban area east of
Jakarta, celebrated its 46th anniversary yesterday. Malls,
housing areas and industrial sites abound but the administration
still has to cope with 23 of the 237 villages being categorized
as below the poverty line .
According to official reports, Bekasi, originally called the
Jatinegara regency, came into being on Aug. 15, 1950.
The historian Poerbatjaraka traces the regency's embryo to the
Tarumanegara kingdom, established by King Purnawarman around the
year 450.
Bekasi has long been a popular name, even before it was
inaugurated as a regency. It was the site of various military
encounters during the struggle for independence, most of which
are commemorated in the poem Antara Kerawang-Bekasi by the late
Chairil Anwar in the 1940s.
Fifty years later Bekasi makes the headlines for its
robberies, murders and sexual assaults.
A gang of criminals robbed Acan, a 45-year-old farmer, and
raped his wife and two daughters, aged 14 and 15, in front of him
last July.
The trauma was barely over when a similar robbery and sexual
assault struck another farmer, Yanto, in January and February.
While sociologists said it was the social gap that provoked
the series of crimes, police officials and city authorities point
to the lack of infrastructure in far-flung areas of the regency
which is more than four times the size of the capital.
Police resources are also limited, said Lt. Col. Elfrizo
Tobing, the former Bekasi Police Chief.
Bekasi, designed as a buffer zone for the capital city, covers
148,437 hectares and has a current population of 2.8 million.
The regency has to provide 6,000 hectares of land for scores
of factories owned by both global and national corporations.
There are currently more than 14 industrial estates in the
regency housing about 700 manufacturing companies.
Bekasi is also assigned by the West Java provincial
administration to provide tens of thousands of hectares for
housing and real estate for people earning their living in
Jakarta.
The local administration stated that presently there are 340
construction developers working to build 750,000 houses on 22,000
hectares.
The establishment of industrial and real estates has
contributed to the local economic growth.
"Realization of the original local revenues within the last
five years has always been 27 percent higher than the targets,"
head of the regency's public relations department Atang Sudjana,
told The Jakarta Post yesterday.
He added that the original local revenues contributed more
than 56 percent of the regency's annual budget.
He said the local budget for the 1996/1997 fiscal year
increased by 12 percent to Rp 103 billion (US$43.8 million), from
Rp 90,837 billion the previous year.
Bekasi's impressive growth has, in the last 10 years, compared
favorably with the neighboring regencies of Bogor and Tangerang
in West Java.
But Suganda, 60, an informal leader of Kebalen village, does
not appear to be proud to be a resident of the rapidly expanding
regency.
He now lives with his two wives and 10 children behind a
private bank which stands on a plot which was formerly his.
"I had to sell my building and land to feed my family," he
said.
He added that one day he might sell all his property. His
farm land has also been sold.
He was one of those who became instantly rich as he sold when
land was being bought up by housing and factory developers -- but
like several of his neighbors, the money quickly disappeared in
the quest for a comfortable standard of living.