Evicted squatters asked to leave rights body's office
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)