I will show you the development of the urban poor, in broad
strokes, over the last 20 years. And I'll also tell you what kind of
work we are doing as a response to this situation.
In
the late 1970s and early 1980s, Malaysia, was developing the industry
then, so they moved from import-oriented industry, begin to export
oriented development, industries and factories.
Because of this kind of development, it created a lot of
attraction for the poor people from the countryside to migrate to the
city for business opportunities and jobs in the factories that were
springing up. Also created
a lot of slums and squatter areas - there wasn't much support from
government for housing in general - same story in many Asian countries.
Then in the mid 1980s, there was a economic depression, which
created a lot of retrenchment. Evictions
were happening, but this heightened. In 1989, the depression started to
end, recovery. So that land
under settlements became a commodity, and there were more and more
evictions. Kuala Lumpur was fast expending then. Before that, when there was eviction, there was no
alternative housing for the squatters, no choice, no resettlement.
Just evict them.
In
a way, the economic crisis was good for us.
From the perspective of organizing.
They stopped all the evictions because they don't need the land,
the developers were stuck in their projects, so you don't need the land.
SO we had some breathing space for a few years.
The government concentrated on bailing out businesses and banks
with loans and all that. Nothing
for urban poor in the crisis.
Long
Houses : In the 1980s, the idea of this "long House"
temporary settlement was started by the government.
These were supposed to be temporary transit quarters for
squatters, supposed to be for 6 months to 2 years.
The idea was that people should stay in the temporary long house
until the time they could be moved into low-cost houses or flats built
by the government. But it
was not a good project. Not
efficient. Lot of
corruption and it cost a lot of money to build these long houses, which
were actually made very badly of plywood and asbestos sheets.
So it didn't work out, but the government pushed this idea, and a
lot of squatters got stuck in the temporary long houses - many are still
there, twenty years later! Also,
the permanent housing wasn't happening, also for corruption.
Politicians would use promises of low-cost houses as a very
strong attractive point for their election campaigns to get votes.
Also, local politicians would get hold of housing units from the
developers of housing in exchange for signing their permits.
Then
in the end of 1980s to 1997 crisis, there was a ten year period where
Malaysia's economy really leaped very fast and very high.
This was the time when a lot of migrant workers started to come
into the country to work - almost 1 million Indonesians in Malaysia,
also Pakistanis, Burmese, Bangladeshis. At that time, squatter evictions were happening quite
rapidly, as city expanded and land costs rose dramatically. Until the economic crisis in 1997 - 98, we could see there
were a lot of empty buildings in Kuala Lumpur - houses, shop houses,
high-rise apartments, condominiums, flats, - until today. They
over-built. No demand and
speculation. Like Bangkok.
Around
this time, the government admitted that this long-house system was not
working, and they projected a "squatter free city" by 2005.
So now this has become a major target for the government.
So they are going on the express
lane for eviction - there is a LOT of eviction happening now in
KL. Eviction from squatters
- some if they are lucky go to low-cost houses, some go to long-houses,
some get evicted from one longhouse to another long house.
This is a very difficult time for our work.
Actually we have some eviction cases right now.
So some of our friends are organizing them.
PERMAS
has been organizing since the 1980s.
A lot of these people that we organized, we followed them from
the squatter areas to the long houses. So we continue to monitor them
and organize them. What we
did was - see in Malaysia, it is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic
country, so it's very difficult to organize urban people, especially
when you have an economic boom like this - the distraction is a lot, you
cannot even call for a meeting, because people feel that if they come
for a meeting, they'll loose a lot of income.
Imagine a truck driver earns about US$ 20 a day, and if it is a
holiday, he gets twice that much. It's
a lot of money, so how can you pull them to come together?
And in the urban areas, they are very diversified - some work as
truck drivers, some as taxi drivers, factory workers, domestic servants,
so their time is different. And
all the more with ethnic differences, and their suspicion among the
different races is very difficult to organize.
And we go to a community that is all Indians, we need a
translator! And suspicion
between Indians, Malays, Chinese. Because
we had a very bad ethnic class in the late 1960s, when a lot of people
were killed, and the enmity is still there.
But
one important threshold, in 1998, when the deputy Prime Minister Anwar
was arrested by Mahathir, that created a split in the Malay block, that
gave us a lot of chance to go in. So
now I can go (as a Chinese ethnic person) into the Malay area talking
with all these Imams and Malay leaders who were very conservative.
In the past this would not have been possible. To even enter the area would have been highly suspicious.
And because there is a lot of heavy patronage politics in
Malaysia, so it's hard to go into an area, because any area will be
controlled by certain political parties. And sometimes all government political parties. So when we go
in to create an alternative force, it's very difficult - you get
thrashed by gangsters, government sanctions, police coming to harass.
So it's a lot harder to organize than other Asian countries -
racial, religions and economic barriers.
So
we've been trying to create some alternatives to show the people that
look, you don't have to go to the political parties for what you need,
you have an alternative movement that will represent you, not just one
race or one political viewpoint. So
we have been trying to create pocket groups of alternative leadership in
poor communities, through training, etc. We also negotiate with
government officials, to facilitate the people to form their own
movement.
About
3 years ago, we launched the Alliance
of Long Houses, in a big meeting.
ACHR supported us. We
launched the movement with about a thousand community leaders, who
represented about 25 communities. (Dig
out those reports). Today
they meet once a month to discuss and plan actions.
Maybe by August 2002, we plan to march to Parliament and dialogue
with them to pressure for demands.
Permas
: Our organization Permas
does not have funding
- for the past 15 - 20 years, we do not have full time staff, all of us
are volunteers. For many
years, we have started to groom the local leadership from the people.
Permas is a membership based movement.
I am the only one that is not from the poor community.
We want people to be in the front in the end.
In our committee of 9 people, they are all community leaders,
some of whom came for the exposure.
What we do :
·
training community organizers from poor communities
·
dialogue and negotiate with government
·
mass mobilizations
·
community meetings
We
also use different issues as an entry point.
social services like providing food for
widows and health services for the sick, etc. These are all
entry points to organize. In that particular Long House Alliance, we were able to invite
the Minister's representative to attend.
In Malaysia, it's VERY difficult to meet the government
officials. Sometimes, you
can wait the whole day and they will not see you. It's not even minister, just one lousy, low-ranking
government bureaucrat -- whose pay comes from our tax. And
yet we cannot see him, you know!
In
one case, the water in one area had been cut, so we brought all the
dirty clothes and the buckets and put it in front of the minister's
office, and started to shout! Only
thirty people there and they sent a whole squad of policemen with M-16s!
That is the paranoia of the Malaysian government!
We
work in Kuala Lumpur and around KL.
Malaysia uses the state system, we have 13 states.
KL is in Selangor state. But
KL is federal territory, not under state government.
Just
two months ago, they changed the policy:
instead of state government taking care of the housing issues,
now they have centralized it to the central government.
Why? We suspect
because it was not working - a lot of corruption at the state level.
Now
we're trying to talk to the Minister about what is going on with the new
housing set-up. Information
flow about government programs is tightly controlled in Malaysia, nobody
really knows what's going on. They
make policies just like that - suddenly.
Suddenly you see in tomorrow's newspaper, bang!
NGOs are out of this process, we just wait for the newspapers!
The housing developers have more access to government officials
than us. Every time we are
about to stage an action to the Chief Minister's office, when we go
there, the housing developers are just coming out of the office - they
know about our action, so they go first and talk to the minister -
always!
The
government figures: in Selangor State itself, there are about 40,000 people who
still do not have permanent housing (including squatters and long-house
dwellers). In Kuala Lumpur
the population is less than 2 million.
But that's the government figures.
From our own calculation, from the long-houses alone, it's
already 50,000 people! What
about squatter areas? What
about the 1 million migrant workers in Malaysia,
including KL
Indonesian
Migrant workers plight :
Indonesians migrants take the lowest paying jobs of all.
Now a lot of evictions of Indonesians - who have no rights, no
right to relocation or long-houses, only a few days notice, if they're
lucky. They can't afford
any kind of real housing, so they mostly rent or buy units from local
squatters - they are tenants of squatters!
Then when the authorities start to survey the settlement for
eviction and find that it's a migrant worker, they'll just break his
unit. It's very hard to organize them, they are suspicious.
So this is one idea, where our Indonesian friends may like to
come over to help organize the Indonesians in KL! The Indonesian migrant workers are really suffering.
