Fire victims asked not to rebuild home
Fire victims asked not to rebuild home
JAKARTA (JP): District authorities announced Saturday that
attempts to persuade West Tebet fire victims not to rebuild at
the fire site were paying off.
"So far, the situation is under control. They are willing to
listen to what we say and wait," Santoso RA, chief of Tebet
District, told The Jakarta Post.
On Saturday, the district chief, in the company of dozens of
police officers, inspected the area destroyed by a three-hour
fire on Wednesday morning.
A total of 230 houses were lost to the fire, leaving around
1,000 people homeless.
Although some residents of West Tebet subdistrict had started
rebuilding their premises in the area on Saturday morning,
Santoso was able to convince them to drop the efforts for the
time being.
The residents stopped their construction after tense
negotiations with Santoso.
Since the fire on Wednesday, the South Jakarta mayoralty has
issued several pleas to the residents to refrain from rebuilding
their homes, but fire victims continued with plans to reconstruct
their homes.
Tebet deputy district chief, R. Sukatma Wijaya, had even told
the fire victims that the site was designated as a "green zone"
under the city master plan, not as a residential area. For that
reason, they would not be allowed to rebuild their houses there.
Soeparto, the neighborhood secretary for the fire stricken
community criticized this prohibition, saying: "This area is not
for a green zone and that means we can build our houses here as
long as the coefficient (the percentage of developed acreage in
relation to the area of undeveloped land) is low."
In a bid to calm the fire victims, Santoso said he had
reprimanded his aide for his harsh stance.
He finally persuaded them to stop rebuilding their homes
pending a meeting between officials of the district office and
the mayoralty administration.
The fire victims agreed to hold off on the construction
pending the results of the meeting which was scheduled for
yesterday evening.
Santoso refused to tell Post what he expected to accomplish
with the meeting, but informed sources said the officials would
discuss municipal plans to build low-cost apartment buildings in
the area in order to provide decent dwellings for the fire
victims.
The two-hectare fire site is part of a 6.7-hectare area in the
subdistrict where a number of residents of Senayan district were
relocated in 1961 following the construction of Senayan stadium
for the Asian Games.
Soeparto said that people who possessed land in the Senayan
area at the time were given plots elsewhere in the city in
compensation by the government.
According to 1993 data there are 3,061 people living in the
fire stricken area of Tebet. They are mostly newcomers because
the former Senayan land owners living there have diminished in
numbers over the years.
Jakarta's acting governor, Idroes, was quoted by the Merdeka
daily on Friday as saying that the municipality would build low-
cost apartments in the area, mainly for the fire victims.
He said each homeless family would be given Rp 500,000
(US$233.4) to cover housing expenses per year pending the
completion of the construction. (jsk)