WIPING away tears, Dharma Diani, a 40-year-old woman in a black headscarf, recounts how Jakarta’s city government gave her less than a fortnight’s notice before evicting her family and flattening their home last year. Hers was one of 400 families in Pasar Ikan, an informal settlement on the edge of Jakarta’s old port, who saw their houses razed as part of a scheme to improve the city’s flood defences. The authorities gave no help or compensation, she says, just the offer of a cheap rental apartment in a distant suburb. But a vigilante group called Islam Defenders Front (FPI, by its Indonesian acronym) did help, handing out food, water and bedding.
When locals rebuilt a mosque demolished at the same time as their houses, they named it al-Jihad, a gesture of defiance at the urban-renewal schemes championed by Jakarta’s governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok. The walls that still stand at Pasar Ikan are daubed with anti-Ahok slogans. And when FPI organised five minibuses to ferry people from Pasar Ikan to the city centre to join a protest against the governor, Ms Diani willingly...Continue reading
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