Urban poor, marginalized by the city

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.