Green Garden embroiled in bitter land dispute
Green Garden embroiled in bitter land dispute
JAKARTA (JP): PT Green Garden, one of the city's most prominent developers, is embroiled in a bitter land dispute with farmers in the Rorotan subdistrict of North Jakarta.
The farmers vow to stay until the developer pays them more compensation but the developer insists that they are illegally occupying four hectares of land it appropriated in the early 1980s.
The company is seeking to have the peasants removed to make way for the construction of an upmarket housing complex.
Both PT Green Garden and the farmers said yesterday they would call in the authorities to help settle the 10-month-old dispute, which has been marked by attacks on the company's office building in Rorotan.
"We'll have them (the farmers) get out of the site because it's our land ... we have the legal documents," Hengky, president of PT Green Garden, told The Jakarta Post yesterday.
Cathy Lengkong, chairwoman of the Indonesian Scavengers Association who said she was a representative of the farmers, said the developer had refused to pay appropriate compensation.
"The company only wants to pay Rp 1 million (US$447) to all of the 60 farmers and offer them free transportation to their home towns," she told reporters separately early yesterday.
Cathy, a former artist, said that the farmers sought no more than Rp 100,000 for each square meter of the land.
The farmers have lived on and tilled the land since 1982, she said. She accused the developer of forcing poor people to leave without proper compensation.
Hengky, for his part, said that Cathy was using the farmers for her own personal ends. "She has no business at all in the matter," he said.
According to Hengky, his company obtained the title to the land from the Jakarta city administration for the 43,000-square- meter plot of land in the early 1980s to build a housing complex to be named Kompleks Green Garden.
Hengky claimed that it was the company who brought in the 19 farming families from Indramayu, West Java, in the early 1980s in order that they could till and safeguard the land before the commencement of the construction project.
According to Hengky, 17 of the 19 families left the area after he gave them Rp 50,000 each and free transport to their home town.
The other two families had been preparing to leave on the next day when, suddenly, Cathy came onto the scene and told them that they should demand more compensation for the land, he said.
"I don't know Cathy's real motive but we're not going to let her stop our project and we'll ask the farmers to leave the site peacefully or we'll force them to," he said. (bsr)