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.