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)