"I wear poverty around my neck, it seems. I was relocated from my house in Senayan *Central Jakarta* and then again from Srengseng Sawah *South Jakarta*." Henry was speaking before a group of dozens of participants at a Betawi culture seminar on Saturday.

He was born in Senayan kampung in 1944, and was raised by parents who sold cow's milk and produced batik at their workshop.

The life of most Betawi natives in his kampung and the two villages nearby (who were also evicted) had revolved around these two industries.

"My father sold fresh milk in the city and sold batik through a cooperative."

Thousands of Betawi people were relocated to Tebet to make way for the government plan to develop the area into Senayan sports center in the early 1960s, to anticipate the fourth Asian Games.

Henry said his parents, who had 1.5 hectares of land in Senayan only got 400 square meters of land in Tebet as compensation.

The situation was miserable because the relocated residents were forbidden to take their cows with them or to produce batik in the new location, he said. Tebet was also prone to crime because the locals knew that the new residents had brought a lot of money with them, Henry said.

"The kampung people had pillows full of money after they sold their canting *batik drawing devices* and dairy cows.

"But after they'd finished building their new houses, they lived in misery because they had no jobs and had begun to run out of money," he said.

Taking care of cows and making batik had been their way of life for generations, and education had not been a concern, which meant they were now stuck for ways to earn a living.

Later, in 1979, after he married, Henry decided to sell his house and land in Tebet and moved to Srengseng Sawah in South Jakarta because of the unreliable security there.

Learning from his past experiences, Henry checked the spatial planning details for site he intended to buy - at both the municipal office and the city hall, to make sure there were no government plans to develop it in future.

"I opened a welding workshop there, which went quite well, but I was not that skilled. And my wife sold tea to students from the University of Indonesia, and vegetables," Henry said.

But then one day in 1985 the nightmare of eviction came back to haunt Henry again, when officials from the subdistrict office arrived and marked his land, claiming it had been chosen for the location of a flyover.

Henry's house was leveled and he was forced to go to the municipal office to take the Rp 54 million offered to him in compensation.

Refusing to back down, Henry asked that the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute to take the case to court, but lost case because it turned out the city had changed the zoning of the area in its new spatial plan.

"The eviction was such a burden that all of a sudden I lost my hearing," Henry said, laughing.

Mona Lohanda, the chairwoman of the National Archive of the Republic Indonesia (ANRI) said other large developments had pushed many Betawi people to the outskirts of Jakarta, and attracted migration from other cities that had caused a rapid increase in poverty.

Media reported that hundreds of Betawi families who once planted vegetables to supply the elite residents of Menteng were relocated to make way for the Hotel Indonesia and its surroundings in Central Jakarta.

Owners of dairy farms in Kuningan, South Jakarta, were also relocated to the southern areas of Pasar Minggu and Depok in West Java when Governor Ali Sadikin developed the Kuningan area in 1974.

Betawi observer Suma Mihardja deplored Jakarta's history of relocating residents, which he said neglected the culture of the Betawi people and left them in poverty.

"The Betawi people are proud to inherit their family professions. The relocations left them with no source of income," Suma said.

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