Kampung Pulo riots on August 20, 2015. Photo: Twitter.
The residents of Kampung Pulo fought back against the government evicting them from their homes, leading to riots and chaos last Thursday, but after that day’s dramatic violence, authorities continued to remove residents of the kampung and tear down their homes along the banks of the Ciliwung River.
The government had long warned the residents of Kampung Pulo about the evictions, arguing that their homes were illegally built on land belonging to the state and that they were preventing a river widening project that would help reduce flooding throughout the area (Kampung Pulo was especially prone to chronic flooding).
Since Thursday’s riots, the Indonesian media has covered the evictions in great detail, with many stories portraying the residents of the kampung as being stubborn to move from land they did not own and ungrateful for the new low-cost apartments that the government had built in nearby Jatinegara to house them.
Many people on social media praised Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama’s refusal to further delay the evictions or negotiate with residents of the kampung whok kept asking the government to compensate them for the land or at least the homes they built on it.
But some argue that Ahok and his administration have been inhumane in their treatment of Kampung Pulo’s residents, and that the media has been buying into unfair stereotypes about slum dwellers in order to justify the government’s actions.
An article entitled “Floods and forced evictions in Jakarta,” published by New Mandala, paints a very different picture of the evictions than the local media. The article was written by two academics -Roanne van Voorst and Rita Padawangi- who have done extensive field work in Kampung Pulo and know its residents well.
You should read the whole article, but one of its main arguments is that the government did not have sufficient justification to declare Kampung Pulo as being built on state-owned land when many of the families there had been living there for generations and had various older forms of proof for land ownership that the government refused to recognize.
Padawangi and van Voorst also argue that Kampung Pulo’s residents created a more acceptable alternative proposal for social housing, which they called Kampung Susun, that was accepted by then governor Joko Widodo in 2013. But Ahok rejected the plan after he took the governor’s office, before going back on promises to compensate residents for land lost during the evictions.
Similar sentiment were raised by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights (Komnas HAM), which also criticized the government’s heavy-handed actions.
“It is regrettable, Jokowi and Ahok promised they would help these citizens. But instead they it was done without giving any compensation, which is not only cruel but a violation of the people’s rights. It’s their property, it should not be like this,” said Siane Indriani, coordinator of Komnas HAM’s Monitoring Sub-committee and Investigation Commission, as quoted by Kompas.
Other criticisms of the evictions include an insufficient number of apartments to house all of the families kicked out of the kampung, as well as arguments that their settlement was not a major factor contributing to flooding in the area.
It’s an extremely complex situation and while we certainly understand arguments both for and against the evictions, the one thing that we are sure about is that people should not have been living in Kampung Pulo. Because of the terrible flooding and unsanitary conditions, people living there would always be subjected to serious health problems, making it extremely that they would ever be able to climb out of poverty.
But the manner by which the government forced them out probably could’ve been handled much better.
Even though the evictions have already been done, we hope that Ahok and the government will listen to these criticisms and do what it can to make sure that everybody forced out of Kampung Pulo will end up in a better place.
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