Medan's colonial buildings lost to poor law enforcement

Apriadi Gunawan, The Jakarta Post, Medan, North Sumatra

Some 300 of the 600 old buildings in Medan have been demolished due to lax law enforcement, according to a survey by the modern Asian Architecture Network (mAAN) and Sumatra Heritage Body (BWS).

The recently completed survey discovered that most of the old buildings were rumah panggung (stilt houses).

BWS executive director Hasti Tarekat said most of the houses had been torn down by their own owners. "The buildings were demolished due to poor law enforcement," said Hasti.

The survey researched houses built between 1860, when Dutch colonizers started to build the city, and 1960.

Hasti said she had urged the Medan administration to declare more houses protected under the bylaw. She said only 150 old buildings were protected under Bylaw No. 6/1988.

"Many more buildings should be protected under the bylaw," she told The Jakarta Post at her office on Jl. Sei Selayang in Medan.

The bylaw rules that anyone damaging a protected building is liable to a maximum sentence of three months in prison and a Rp 50,000 fine, which she considered too lenient and hardly a deterrent. The ruling has rarely been enforced.

She expressed concern about poor enforcement of the law, saying it would allow more and more old buildings in Medan to be demolished, especially for commercial purposes. "The practice has gone on unabated," she said, going on to mention the demolition of the Mega Eltra building and Davidy Barber building on Jl. Brigjen Katamso in the city.

The founder of mAAN, George Kunihiro from Kokushikan University in Japan, separately said that the Medan administration should pay more attention to old buildings in Medan. He said old buildings had historical value that had to be preserved. The buildings could be also used to raise revenue from tourism, he said.

"The buildings have the potential to become tourist sites," he said.

Kunihiro named several buildings in Medan that could be used as tourist sites, including an old building on Jl. Hindu that was used as an opera house during the Dutch occupation.

Christofel Manurung, the head of the local Culture and Tourism Office, said the government was considering revising the bylaw by making it more formidable.

Christofel said the government was looking into the possibility of making some of the old buildings tourist attractions.

He complained, however, that the government faced difficulty in turning old buildings into tourist sites because of opposition from the buildings' owners.

He said that, for example, the government had approached the owner of an old building on Jl. Achmad Yani once owned by the late Tjong A Fie, but the owner rejected the government's proposal of cooperating to operate the building as a tourist site.