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PERAI: Penang’s Senior Vice Minister P Ramasamy today criticized a federal legal body for threatening 200 residents of a small village in Perai with evicting the land or risking a hefty fine of RM500,000, a sentence imprisonment of five years or both.
The Railway Assets Corporation (RAC) issued a six-month eviction notice to the impoverished Kampung Manis community, which has nowhere else to call home after having settled there for several generations.
One resident, N Anjalai, said she had lived there for 78 years.
Residents are being evicted for “trespassing” and occupying RAC land.
On August 24, RAC had invited Ramasamy’s representative, Azrol Sani, along with several other government agents, including the director of the Department of Land and Mines, for a visit to the Kampung Manis site for the purported purpose of inspecting conditions. residents living there.
Ramasamy told reporters that he would never have allowed the visit if RAC had had the courtesy to inform his office beforehand of its true purpose.
“We did not know that the purpose of the visit was to evict the residents.”
Ramasamy urged RAC to sufficiently compensate the residents of Kampung Manis before evicting them and working towards a peaceful solution.
He said that since the RAC “had the gall to exploit its constituents,” it should negotiate with him face to face.
“There have been no inquiries about it. Not even a single dialogue.
“Although the land in Kampung Manis is owned by RAC, it has no right to evict the residents against their will without providing them with alternative housing or sufficient compensation.”
Housewife M Letchumie, 25, who is also a third-generation resident of Kampung Manis, told the FMT that her husband signed the eviction agreement believing it was documents for the ongoing national census.
“They only showed us the eviction notice after they had us sign the documents.”
She told FMT that she and her family of 12 had lived there their entire lives and had nowhere else to go.
“This is all we have,” he said. “We don’t have enough to pay for another house.”
Sutami Kaslan, a 50-year-old single mother of two, said she was not even aware of the eviction until a friend told her over the phone.
“All I want is a roof over our heads for my two children. If they evict us now, where will we go?
She said she was earning RM20-30 per day as a roadside food vendor and had run out of options for the future.
Ramasamy promised that as long as he remained a Perai assemblyman, he would not let the RCA get away with his constituents.
