Planned cemetery move meets protest

JAKARTA (JP): A faction of the city council urged the city administration yesterday to cancel the plan to relocate the Sanjaya community cemetery in South Jakarta.

The spokesman of the United Development Party faction, Muhammad Rodja, said the relocation plan, which is based on the ruislag barter system, should be canceled because the land does not belong to the city administration.

"It is impossible to carry out the plan because the land is not owned by the city. Therefore, it should be canceled," Rodja said.

The faction was commenting on results of a hearing between the council's commission E for social welfare and the city cemetery agency, in which the commission urged the city to speed up the barter agreement.

The secretary of the commission, Maryam Achmad, told reporters on Thursday that the city should quicken the relocation plan because it has been suspended for 10 years.

Rodja said the commission has made a mistake in urging the city to carry out the plan because the 11,793 square meters of land on Jl. Sanjaya, now being used as a cemetery, is community property.

"The documents from the cemetery agency show that Sanjaya cemetery is still community property. In 1986, the late Mochtar Zakaria, the former South Jakarta mayor, assured the people that the city administration would not relocate the cemetery," he said.

He explained that the cemetery was built in 1917 and has remained unchanged until now because there is no document which states that the city owns the land.

Rodja said that his faction will ask the council's speaker to review city council decree No.2/1985 which approved a proposal to change the land use from a cemetery into a residential area.

"The decree should be reviewed as an effort to protect the cemetery," he said.

According to Rodja, the city administration signed a barter agreement with a private developer, PT Citra Lestari Sentosa, in 1985.

The agreement stipulated that the developer can develop the cemetery. In return, it was asked to build a junior high school building and a street in West and Central Jakarta.

Rodja added that the faction is also protesting a policy to relocate the city's cemeteries, especially those located on plots of land belonging to the community.

"Cemeteries are important, because they also function as the city's green areas," he said.

The city should have developed the cemeteries and turned them into beautiful green areas rather than relocate them and use the areas for apartments or real estate, Rodja said.

He said that the faction has been trying to stop the policy "But the city administration is "too powerful". In fact, we have been urging the administration to stop the policy in every plenary season. But it simply ignored us and relocation continued," he said. (yns)