Select team to oversee security in Blok M area
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)