theSun Daily | Kampung Buah Pala
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The tragedy of Kampung Buah Pala
Himanshu Bhatt
JUST a few days before bulldozers showed up at Kampung Buah Pala last month, in what turned out to be a failed attempt to demolish the village, an emotional resident showed me an old crinkled photograph of her great grandmother, who had lived in the settlement about a hundred years back.
Little would the guileless young woman with a haunting expression in the picture have known that her descendants would one day have to fight a pitched battle to defend that very ancestral land that she had toiled on.
Much has been said about the Kampung Buah Pala crisis. But a problem in this whole affair is that it is swamped in a morass of political chest-thumping and technical legalese that it is difficult for the general public to appreciate, let alone understand, the intrinsic dilemma of the villagers.
Those who have witnessed the audacious stance the villagers put up to protect their homes may better perceive the impulse that drives these descendants of planters and cowherds to literally face death in such a manner.
theSun Daily on Kampung Buah Pala, read it more here
Himanshu Bhatt
JUST a few days before bulldozers showed up at Kampung Buah Pala last month, in what turned out to be a failed attempt to demolish the village, an emotional resident showed me an old crinkled photograph of her great grandmother, who had lived in the settlement about a hundred years back.
Little would the guileless young woman with a haunting expression in the picture have known that her descendants would one day have to fight a pitched battle to defend that very ancestral land that she had toiled on.
Much has been said about the Kampung Buah Pala crisis. But a problem in this whole affair is that it is swamped in a morass of political chest-thumping and technical legalese that it is difficult for the general public to appreciate, let alone understand, the intrinsic dilemma of the villagers.
Those who have witnessed the audacious stance the villagers put up to protect their homes may better perceive the impulse that drives these descendants of planters and cowherds to literally face death in such a manner.
theSun Daily on Kampung Buah Pala, read it more here
