Evicted squatters asked to leave rights body's office
JAKARTA (JP): About 250 people who moved into the complaint room of the National Commission on Human Rights office on Jl. Latuharhari after they were evicted from Pancoran Mas last week have been asked to leave the office.
The commission's secretary-general Baharudin Lopa suggested they rent small houses in the areas they lived in before they moved to Pancoran Mas.
"This office is not a shelter. We can't afford to feed them for a long time. There is no budget for that," Lopa said.
He said he suggested they rent small houses because he knew that the men were still working, mostly as drivers.
"They are not really poor families."
But the commission would not force them to leave the office, he said. "We have asked them politely."
Lopa said the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Depok mayoralty seemed unable to offer them temporary shelter.
The commission has written to the mayoralty asking them to arrange temporary shelter for the evicted people.
The men, women, children and babies began sleeping in the complaint room last Tuesday after they were evicted from "their land" in Depok on April 17.
The Bogor and Depok mayoralty bulldozed 700 makeshift houses that had been built on 19-hectares of the Ministry of Health's land in Pancoran Mas, Depok.
The squatters asked the commission yesterday to let them stay because they said there was no place for them to stay in the city.
"It's nice here. We sleep in an air-conditioned room," one of the "refugees" said.
He said he and his friends could not work because soldiers had taken their clothes in the eviction.
People were sitting or lying on mats in the commission's front yard yesterday.
A Christian preacher, Yoriono, visited them yesterday and asked the commission to let them stay until they found another shelter.
"They don't have money. They used their money to build their shanties but the mayoralty demolished them without giving them enough time to prepare," the preacher, from a Cengkareng church in West Jakarta, said. (jun)