Fear of Kampung Buah Pala II haunts villagers

By Athi Shankar - Free Malaysia Today

GEORGE TOWN: Kampung Melayu Tanjung Tokong residents here are having sleepless nights. They have their reason: the “ghost” of Kampung Buah Pala is haunting them.
Like Kampung Buah Pala, the residents of Kampung Melayu Tanjung Tokong fear that their historical village will also be demolished.

And they want the state government to form a special task force immediately to address and resolve all issues pertaining to their village before allowing redevelopment project on the site.

In making this call, Tanjung Tokong Villagers Association chairman Mohd Salleh Yahaya slammed Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng's administration for “doing very little” in resolving the outstanding issues faced by the village, especially on the preservation of heritage.

The state government has recently issued a stop-work order on the redevelopment of Tanjung Tokong undertaken by the Urban Development Authority (UDA).

Acknowledging this though, Salleh, however, is upset that the state government had been silent over the pressing issue since.
He claimed the state government had left it to UDA and the villagers to resolve the issue among themselves.

He said UDA has now seized the opportunity to split the villagers by making many “dubious” offers of compensation to them.

Claiming that some have been influenced by UDA's offers, he said most villagers were still united to preserve their village.

“By right, the state government should have formed a special task force to resolve the problems. The task force could become a middle man between UDA and the villagers,” Salleh said.

Howerver, the state government has always claimed that it was powerless to stop UDA from evicting the villagers, flattening the site and carrying out its development scheme.

Posh condo project

Kampung Melayu Tanjung Tokong currently occupies 24 acres of land on which stand 300 houses, 30 of them built illegally.
Part of the original village site had already been rebuilt by UDA into flats for ethnic Malay low income group.

Salleh alleged that UDA has also embarked on a posh commercial condominium project on a nearby reclaimed coastal site allotted by the previous Barisan Nasional state government.

The association has called on both the federal and state governments to set aside part of the village site as heritage Malay village.

Historians say Kampung Melayu Tanjung Tokong is the oldest Malay fishing village in Penang, and several civic groups have accused the UDA of wanting to wipe it off the map and build in its place modern residential and commercial complexes.

However, due to lukewarm response by both governments, Kampung Tanjung Tokong residents fear that the village would end up like Kampung Buah Pala, the Indian enclave in Penang that was demolished last year.

It was Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s late father, Abdul Razak Hussein, who, as the coutnry's second prime minister, launched the scheme to restructure, redevelop and upgrade the village under UDA in 1972.

The idea was to create a Malay settlement in George Town.

However, UDA subsequently decided to relocate some of the villagers. In 2008, it declared the remaining villagers as squatters.

Money matters
Last year, the Kampung Melayu Villagers Association, which has about 500 members, collected some 3,000 signatures nationwide and submitted memorandums to Putrajaya and the state government seeking their intervention to save the village.

Salleh wants the Najib government to walk the talk on the 1Malaysia concept with “swift and decisive intervention” to save their village from extinction.

He accused UDA of being interested only in money matters, saying the federal body was focusing now on achieving its corporate goals, and not restructuring, redeveloping and upgrading the place as an urban ethnic Malay village enclave in George Town.

He also accused the state government of being pro-developer.

“We are losing our rights over our land even though we are the descendants of the original natives of Penang.

"This is due to UDA's statutory declaration and lack of incisive action from the federal and state governments.

"The demolition of Kampung Buah Pala and now our village shows that both governments lack people-orientated policies,” Salleh said.