Select team to oversee security in Blok M area

JAKARTA (JP): The South Jakarta mayoralty has set up a special team, with personnel taken from different agencies, to be in charge of reinforcing security at the Blok M shopping area.

Spokesman for the South Jakarta mayoralty, Mohammad Yanis, said yesterday that the team was set up after Blok M security officials conceded they were unable to do their job and had asked the local government to review security arrangement.

The so called "collective team" will consist of personnel from the military, police and mayoralty offices, Yanis said.

The formation of the team was announced only a day after the mayoralty's security officers cracked down on roadside vendors operating in Blok M, which is one of Jakarta's largest business centers.

On Sunday, dozens of security officers confiscated vendors' equipment kept in a parking area.

The parking area, located on the ground floor of the Pasar Jaya building, is well-known to be controlled by street hoodlums, who often cause security problems in the area. Street vendors and blue collar workers in the shopping complex also use the lot to sleep in at nights.

Vendors store their equipment in the area for between Rp 3,000 (US$1.3) and Rp 5,000 a day.

While the operation was in progress, a man claiming to represent the vendors came up and protested to the vice mayor, Zainuddin, who led the operation.

"Do you think you have any right to confiscate these poor people's equipment?" the man said. "don't you realize they are ordinary people?"

Zainuddin insisted that the operation was needed to make the Blok M area a clean, safe and orderly shopping center. To do so, he said, roadside vendors have to be moved.

In Sunday's operation, mayoralty officers also demolished an illegal building and would prosecute its owner.

Early this year, an off-duty police officer was killed by drunken street thugs.

Zainuddin said the operation was part of monthly security-and- order operations, held as part of the national discipline drive launched by President Soeharto last month.

He also urged the state-owned agency that oversees market places in the city, PD Pasar Jaya, to help clear hoodlums and vendors from the Blok M area, especially in the parking lot.

Jakarta authorities have been waging a campaign against street hoodlums since the killing of the police officer in Blok M earlier this year.

Hundreds of hoodlums rounded up in a nationwide operation were given vocational training at military camps inside and outside Jakarta, with the hope that the "graduates" would have enough skills to find jobs.(29)