|
By Himanshu Bhatt. SANDWICHED between metropolitan George Town in the north and the new townships mushrooming further south in what were previously laid-back regions of Penang island, Jelutong has for long been viewed as a relatively unimportant suburban backwater.
But little do people know that a huge swathe of land that cuts through Jelutong had during the 90s been earmarked for a wave of new development plans. Today, some two decades later, this same area has erupted to become the centre of a looming eviction crisis, and has become symbolic of numerous other cases spread across the state.
Hundreds of residents in eight urban villages are facing eviction in Jelutong alone. It is little wonder that Jelutong MP Jeff Ooi, who has had his hands full, labelled them the "eight big headaches". The episode of Kampung Buah Pala, in which the century-old Indian settlement was demolished last year amid dramatic scenes of resistance, was but a prologue to what is now a much bigger predicament confronting the state. What has complicated the whole affair is that political elements have streamed into the villages, with some genuinely trying to assist the communities, while others are ostensibly taking advantage to press their own agenda. Ooi has taken exception to certain quarters who he says are inciting residents to go against the state. Referring to a recent protest outside a mosque in which the state leadership was accused of not looking after interests of Malay communities, Ooi said the racial slant of the allegation was unwarranted. Of the eight cases, he explains, only two are Malay-majority villages. The rest are mostly Chinese, he says. All the cases are also long-drawn affairs that had begun under the previous state administration. "Many of these development issues were inherited. I hate to make reference to this matter but it is a fact," Ooi says. But the state Opposition leader, Datuk Azhar Ibrahim, who is also the Umno assemblyman for Penaga on the mainland, has a different take on the matter. Azhar said that just as in the Kampung Buah Pala case, approval by the Penang Island Municipal Council (MPPP) for development to go ahead in some of the villages – including the highly charged Malay-majority Kampung Pokok Asam – were given after the Pakatan Rakyat took power in March 2008. "When this matter was brought up during the time BN was in power, we had imposed a condition that development approval would only be given once issues of relocation and compensation were settled," said Azhar, a member of the previous BN state executive council. "But in the case of the Pakatan government, approval was given even before any amicable agreement was reached." Interestingly, Azhar’s own rural constituency has also not been spared its share of controversy. Earlier this year, families from four villages along the Muda river in Penaga complained that the federal Land and Mines Department wanted them to vacate even though they had yet to be provided transit accommodation. The land on which the houses stand were required for a federal flood-mitigation project. Further south, in Tasek Gelugor, yet another village with some 250 families at the fringe of the Royal Malaysian Air Force Base (RMAF) had been asked to move out last year from the land which comes under the purview of the Defence Ministry. The villagers of Kampung Paya Terbakar were asked to clear out ten years ago, but the issue was rekindled after village homes were damaged on Nov 11 last year when an F-15 Eagle jet fighter of the United States Air Force flew too low during training with RMAF. Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Tan Sri Nor Mohamed Yackop, who is the MP of Tasek Gelugor, has himself said the villagers need to make way for a new runway. And Nor Mohamed came into the spotlight again when he recently took a dig at the state government about another controversy, this time of the century-old Kampung Binjai in Bayan Lepas, where about 80% of the village is expected to be demolished to make way for development. Nor Mohamed has insisted that the state should mete the same treatment to Kampung Binjai as it did for Kampung Buah Pala where most of the households were told they would be given double-storey terrace houses each as compensation. It is but the tip of the iceberg of the sustained pressure Penang now faces amid the protracted drama of traditional communities being uprooted and threatened by the overwhelming pace of development in the state. ** Reproduced with permission. This article first appeared in the July 22, 2010 issue of theSun. Himanshu is the newspaper's Penang bureau chief.
 |
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
