Residents protest house bulldozing

JAKARTA (JP): Residents in Ujung Menteng, East Jakarta, are protesting the mayoralty administration's decision to pull down their houses.

The protesters took the demolition case to the City Council's Commission A on administrative affairs on Wednesday.

"We were upset when bulldozers and workers hired by the mayoralty administration demolished our houses last June because we had not agreed to the compensation," said A. Rosyid, a spokesperson for the protesters.

Rosyid said that the compensation, which was unilaterally set by the East Jakarta mayor not by the land appropriation committee, ranged between Rp 88,000 and Rp 165,000 per square meter, far below the Rp 1.05 million per square-meter the residents asked for.

Regulations state that the amount of compensation paid for government projects is set by a land acquisition committee in consensus with residents, not by a mayor.

"Now a total of six families, around 30 people, have to live in emergency huts at the location with a wire fence around them," Rosyid said.

He explained that the administration appropriated the 1,700 square meter plot to make way for a shortcut connecting Jl. Bekasi Raya, a main road in the Ujung Menteng area, with a housing complex owned by PT Metropolitan Development.

"It is not a purely public project as stated by the mayoralty officials," Rosyid said, adding that the mayoralty intervened in the case after negotiations between residents and the developer failed.

Rosyid also accused the East Jakarta mayoralty administration of dumping earth on 40 graves without giving the families a chance to remove the corpses on Sept. 14. (yns)