Residents protest mounting garbage

Residents protest mounting garbage

Ahmad Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

At least 100 residents of Penjaringan, North Jakarta, staged a
demonstration at City Hall on Thursday to protest the lack of
city action in removing the growing heaps of garbage in their
neighborhoods.

The protesters, who arrived in four medium-sized buses,
unfurled posters and banners with slogans like, "We want proof,
not promises!" and "Bored to be ordinary people!"

Warjono, one of the representatives, demanded that the City
Sanitary Agency remove garbage from at least three community
units, where hundreds of residences are located in Penjaringan.

"We have cleaned up our neighborhood and collected the garbage
-- but it has not been taken away yet, and has been neglected for
almost two weeks," Warjono said.

He also asked the Jakarta city administration to help provide
powder to kill off the abundant mosquito larvae which have formed
to avoid an outbreak of dengue fever in the area.

Another resident named Sagem complained that her neighborhood
never received donations, such as food and clothes, from the
administration during the earlier floods.

The protest took place only two days after the City Sanitation
Agency officials announced that they had spent Rp 1 billion
(US$98,040) to clean up the piles of garbage left over from the
floods.

City Public Order Office head Firman Hutajulu, who received
some of the protesters, promised that his office would deploy
2,000 officers to clean up the garbage and arm them with
mosquito-killing powder on Sunday.

As the meeting ended, the protesters received Rp 1 million
from the city administration.

"This money was reimbursement for our bus rental fee. We
earlier borrowed money from the Islamic teaching group in our
neighborhood to get here," the group's organizer, Wignyo P.,
said.

Separately, City Sanitary Agency deputy head Rama Boedi
admitted that garbage in the Penjaringan could not be removed
quickly since was located far from the city's main garbage depot
Bantar Gebang, Bekasi.

"Penjaringan is in the western part of North Jakarta, so it's
possible that their garbage could not have been transported" in
the first place, Rama told reporters.

He had earlier claimed that the agency hired 83 private
garbage trucks to collect the post-flood garbage,

According to city records, however, that number of trucks
hired was only 57.