Indonesia has vowed to clean up its reputation as a sex tourism hub.
Police have been sweeping the country’s red-light districts with raids, in an effort to clamp down on prostitution in the conservative nation.
The government has already come down hard on 68 of these areas, and are working on shutting down the remaining 100 in the next three years, social affairs minister Khofifah Indar Parawansa told the Jakarta Post this week.
Last week, some 6,000 policemen descended on the infamous Kalijodo district in North Jakarta — an area that holds about 500 businesses across 1.6 hectares (16,000 square metres) — and raided cafes and brothels there for alcohol, drugs and weapons. They found 9,900 bottles of alcohol and 166 packs of condoms.
Prostitution is illegal in Indonesia, and Kalijodo is a major prostitution hub in Jakarta. The administration is so bent on cleaning out the red-light districts that bulldozers are scheduled to move in on the district next Monday.
This will leave roughly 3,000 residents and legal business owners there out of jobs and homes. A local resident told ABC News that authorities gave her an eviction notice just a week ago. A food seller in Kalijodo said he had been paying his land tax for the last 15 years, and was unhappy that authorities wouldn’t be compensating him during the eviction.
The authorities have assured displaced residents that they will have new homes in low-cost government housing located in the outskirts of Jakarta, but will not be extending the offer to those working in nightlife establishments. The Jakarta Post reports that about half the people living in Kalijodo have jobs related to nightlife, such as security guards, cleaning staff and valets — in addition to prostitutes.
According to a Kompas report, the head of the Penjaringan subdistrict, Abdul Khalid, said on Monday that only 202 households were eligible for the housing, out of the 1,340 in Kalijodo. Although they weren’t running brothels per se, bar or cafe owners that ended up having their venues being used for prostitution activities were struck out, too.
The social affairs ministry said it has reached out to Kalijodo’s sex workers to offer them skills training at its social work facility. But none have come forward so far.
Kalijodo’s demolition follows the shutting down of the brothels across Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, in 2014.
According to Reuters, 650 sex workers there were trained under the government’s rehabilitation programme between 2010 and 2013, equipping themselves with skills such as cooking and hairdressing. Surabaya is about 774 km (411 miles) away from Jakarta.
