Urban poor, marginalized by the city

Ida Indawati Khouw The Jakarta Post Jakarta

Who's the enemy of the Jakarta administration this year? The answer is neither criminals, nor poverty, nor others one might think more obvious.

The enemy, perversely, is the urban poor.

This statement is no exaggeration. In fact, it can be proven if we review what the administration has been doing to the poor throughout the year, backed by regulations that don't allow livable space for the legions of disadvantaged among us.

The long, sad, stories of confiscations of becak (pedicabs), the demolition of houses along riverbanks, the destruction of sidewalk kiosks, the arrests of street children and other types of cruel repression against the urban poor has become all too common.

It began during the second part of 2001, a time when city officials started formulating a plan to clean the city of its poor.

Among the eviction cases that ravaged slum dwellers' homes and their lives took place in Ancol in North Jakarta, along riverbanks of Pejagalan and Kapuk Muara in West Jakarta, and in the area below the elevated railway in Karang Anyar, Central Jakarta.

In many instances, the confiscations and evictions, sometimes conducted very early in the morning, involved force and gratuitous violence with large numbers of military and police personnel, municipal security guards and even militia members.

Where did the poor go to live afterward?

Some slum residents moved on to occupy space at locations like the National Commission for Children's Protection in East Jakarta, the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute in Central Jakarta, or simply erected tents around the areas from where they were evicted, leading to poor sanitation that contributed to a variety of illnesses.

Data collected by the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC) and other NGOs that work with the urban poor shows that a total of 49,315 becak drivers, food vendors, and car washers lost their livelihood between January and September of 2001. Multiply that by an average of three dependents, and a total of 197,260 persons lost their means of living.

In October 2001, the Jakarta administration reported that it had confiscated 11,400 becak, stored them in a warehouse, and was planning on dumping them into the sea to serve as an artificial habitat for fish.

The administration's directives have led to suffering for thousands of poor people. From January to October 2001 alone, UPC monitored the demolition of 5,785 houses, resulting in the collective displacement of 23,140 people, a number reached by factoring in an estimated average of four persons per family.

In October alone, a partial monitoring conducted by NGOs indicated that some 2,470 families, or 9,880 people altogether, were displaced either due to forced evictions, arson or a combination of both.

The highly inadequate process of relocation (without consultation, or an offer of alternatives) coupled with the harsh conduct of the city public order officials has elicited, in some instances, violent reactions. Clashes often break out between security personnel and becak drivers, sidewalk vendors, slum dwellers and others, with an Aug. 14 crackdown resulting in the death of a security guard.

These confrontations were scenes of virtual warfare between the government and its citizens.

While Governor Sutiyoso clearly denied responsibility for the displacements, he said that those evicted were illegal residents as they did not possess Jakarta identity cards and thus the administration was under no obligation to provide alternatives.

"I believe that they must have hometowns, so they should return to their places of origin," he once said.

He may have forgotten that, although the urban poor have been living in the capital for years, just acquiring an ID card is beyond their means due to the unofficial fees involved.

Worse still is the fact that the administration never seems to learn that conviction is not the answer to all problems, urbanists say.

The urban poor will always find a way to eke out a living in the capital city; many experts agree on this point.

The violent actions taken by the administration were "based" on City Bylaw No. 11/1988 on public order to conduct massive confiscations and forced evictions in the name of making the city clean, reducing crime and traffic jams, while preventing and discouraging even more migrants from moving into the city from the provinces.

Urbanist Marco Kusumawijaya pointed out that the bylaw consists of 33 articles, of which 22 start with "It is forbidden to ..." It is this law that provides the basis for the annual operations by the City Public Order Office.

For UPC and dozens of organizations representing the urban poor, it has been the cause of a perpetual struggle with the administration.

For a long time, NGOs have helped them in their struggle to survive, from staging demonstrations at the city administration building to protesting before members of the central government.

"We have channeled the protest to a higher level, because members of the administration have closed their eyes to the urban poor," said UPC coordinator Wardah Hafidz.

Furthermore, NGOs also show that the 2001 city budget does not side with the poor, as 66.51 percent of its total Rp 7.49 trillion (later revised to Rp 8.1 trillion) goes to routine expenditure, which means to finance the operational cost of the city administration, while allocation for development expenditure, meaning for the interest of the people, is only 33.49 percent.

Here's just one example of the irony of budget allocations: funds for the governor's needs are set at Rp 8.7 billion, while that for the development of people's nutrition is only Rp 325 million.

Indeed, the reform movement doesn't touch the city administration level; on the contrary, the administration appears to preserve the ways of the New Order government with its typical oppression in the name of public order.

In this case, the urban poor are being confronted with the fact that this reform era is not for them.

They are still experiencing the loss of their socioeconomic rights through the confiscation and destruction of their means of livelihood.