Social economic rights need more understanding

Social economic rights need more understanding

Yanuar Nugroho, The Business Watch Indonesia, Surakarta,
Central Java, yanuar-n@unisosdem.org

Look at this time-series data on evictions in Jakarta,
compiled and processed by the Jakarta Social Institute (ISJ) and
the Jakarta Residents' Forum (Fakta). First, during 2001, the
Jakarta municipality, in the name of law and order, evicted the
urban poor 99 times.

We are raising this matter now, as an International Workshop
on Indonesia's NGO Coalition for Human Rights is being held in
this town on Thursday and Friday, ahead of World Human Rights Day
on Dec. 10.

Moreover, the brutal eviction wiped out at least 6,588 houses
and five schools, leaving 6,774 families, or over 34,000 people,
homeless. ISJ and Fakta also say the evictions contributed to the
death of 19 people, injury to 67, depression of 1,000 and
unemployment of 4,252 people.

At least 2,700 worksites were destroyed and the loss was
around Rp 540 million.

Second, last year, 26 evictions were carried out in
residential areas, with a further 20 evictions of street vendors,
in which 4,908 homes were demolished, 18,732 people became
homeless, 15 were injured and 11 were arrested.

Third, as of October, there were 15 evictions, resulting in
over 7,000 homeless families, the killing of one person, a 13-
year-old allegedly raped by a public order official, 20 injured
and a further 26 arrested.

At present, over 300 evicted families of fishermen in Muara
Angke, North Jakarta, are living on their boats with some 30
infants -- heaven knows how much longer they will be able to do
so.

In Surabaya and other big cities, the urban poor are
repeatedly wiped out for the city's "development."

While most of the capital's poor are evicted because they live
and do business on land categorized as "green, open space,"
business interests in the past few years have converted 49,135
square meters of Jakarta's open land into 32 gas stations. Two-
thirds of the protected mangrove in North Jakarta was cleared for
the construction of luxury estates.

"Development" thus seems irrelevant because -- if anything --
it is simply an unintended consequence of individual profit-
seeking ventures carried out by businesses.

The evictions usually involve the brazen seizure of urban land
by commercial and financial giants. The apparatus of the state
are simply the loyal servant of these economic oligarchs.

Saying that only the state is responsible is to ignore the
capacity and the influence of business power -- and this involves
the deeper consequences on how we perceive democracy and human
rights.

We are nearing the end of 2003, yet our notions and practice
of democracy and human rights remain stuck in the 1900s -- when
movements advocating civil and political rights focused on making
the state accountable.

Nowadays the notion of human rights needs to be supplemented
by a concept that takes into account the current state of
affairs, i.e. the power of capital and business, which have
become so immense. In particular, there is an urgency to focus on
the promotion of socioeconomic human rights.

If civil-political rights are exercised in relation to the
workings of state power, socioeconomic human rights concern the
workings of business power, which determines employment (as well
as housing, food, water, health and other basic needs), upon
which the economic survival of more and more people depends.

For instance, privatization of basic services, involving giant
business interests, has deliberately been promoted as the best
way of providing public services.

Often there are two typical reactions. First, the government
alone becomes the target of anger.

Second, the controversy often focuses on technicalities:
Farthest is the question of whether the service is still
affordable to the poor. Rarely is the economic human rights
perspective used to confront the core problem -- the impact of
privatization of essential services that cover almost all areas
of human life, and which should therefore not be controlled by
the logic of pure profit accumulation.

Thus, addressing the problem of economic human rights by
simply targeting the state is to bark up the wrong tree.

The need to raise awareness of social and economic rights in
the country is therefore an urgent challenge if we realize that
it is not the state alone that wields the greatest influence on
our lives.