By Shuntel Glasgow
Despite warnings since October 9 last year that they had to move to make way for an East Bank road link, Mocha Arcadia squatters yesterday defied attempts by the Ministry of Housing to evict them and a standoff developed with dozens of residents and members of the opposition arriving on the scene.
The seven-hour standoff attracted a gathering of approximately 200 residents, Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton, Mayor Ubraj Narine, and members of Parliament Sherod Duncan, Nima Flue-Bess, Ganesh Mahipaul, and Coretta McDonald. Several ranks from the Guyana Police Force were also in attendance at the scene.
During the standoff the street was blocked after a bridge, store room, and concrete porch were bulldozed.
At 15.03 hours Anita Beaton, one of the remaining squatters, had her bridge, store room, and concrete porch of her shop demolished by an excavator on the orders of the Ministry of Housing and Water (MoHW). In response, Beaton said, “We are not collecting their money because we are not properly compensated. We engage (the ministry) up to the 22nd of December and they putting notice that we are not engaging, we ain’t collect housing money. We have livestock and they want us to sell them out, why? Why? ” Other squatters echoed similar sentiments, “We living here for more than 20 years and now they want move we, no way!”
The squatters are contending that they are not being compensated properly and that the road project is not being affected by their presence. They also contended that their lands are ancestral lands. After demolishing some structures, MoHW officials attempted to leave the area, but the residents blocked the street with pieces of lumber while others sat and lay on the street in the path of the vehicles. They demanded that the bridge be replaced since the houses are not in the path of the four-lane highway project.
Leader of the Opposition Norton said, “He [the minister] should come and explain to the people why they are not in the path of the road but they have to move. I am 99.9 per cent sure that if these people end up moving from here they are going to give it to their supporters. So for me its racism, its wickedness, and it is a clear indication that there is no One Guyana. They should have properly been negotiating with these people and regularise it. These things are not in the way of the road, everything is showing that it is not in the way of the road. They must understand that the people aren’t stupid, they know that they are offering them to give them a little house somewhere, this is a road in which once you are on it the property value will go up. You can’t now come and believe that they are stupid, telling them you giving four or five million dollars which can’t build a proper house and then force people to move their cattle from here. This is clear discrimination that is what it is.”
The other Opposition MPs stated that the residents should be engaged as in the recent move by MoHW to distribute land titles to squatters at Pigeon Island, East Coast Demerara. They also stated that as the road project is completed, the price for the lands that the residents are occupying will also increase.
Stabroek News had visited the area on Friday, December 23 and engaged with Beaton. “I don’t have Christmas. I was at the office [ministry] two days ago, I was supposed to get a farm land for my cattle and I don’t know what happen.
Also I told them that the price for the property two years ago is not the price for it now, they need to do another valuation. The money they offering cannot build back the house and also I have a business,” the woman lamented.
Beaton maintained that the families are willing to move if they are compensated properly. The woman also pointed out that the remaining families are commercial business owners and use their properties for their livelihoods.
The families remaining have been identified as those of Joyann Alexis Ellis, Mark Gordon, Junior Ellis, Abigail Ifill, and Beaton.
Minister of Housing Collin Croal on November 30 had made a final plea to the remaining Mocha Arcadia squatters who haven’t taken up the move-in-ready house deal.
Croal said that government’s recent offer to the five squatters whose homes are an encumbrance to the alignment path for the new road is in no way rewarding the unlawful act, but it was providing a humanitarian solution.
Pointing to the efforts made to remove the squatters, Croal informed that since 2008 the PPP/C had been trying to engage those living illegally along the proposed road alignment. Those efforts continued up to 2015, to no avail.
The group had initially agreed to move but then, according to Croal, the issue got political. “The Mocha issue took on a political twist… an anti-developmental twist because it seems that the opposition doesn’t want rapid growth. They encouraged the persons to not accept, without a solution. They didn’t even encourage the people to come in and engage us,” he lamented.
He said that one opposition parliamentarian has been “very confrontational” and without reason wants the squatters to remain in the location.
The Ministry of Housing and Water, one month ago, had offered houses in the Little Diamond Housing Scheme, on the East Bank of Demerara, to the squatters remaining at Mocha, while warning that their homes would be demolished if they did not remove from the path of the major road project.
According to the notice from the ministry that was published in this newspaper, it is prepared and has available “move-in-ready, single-flat two-bedroom housing units” for the squatters, whom it identified as five families.
The notice stated that the squatters were given two-week final notices from November 5 but these had all been ignored. “Every effort by the Ministry has been met with harsh, baseless and irrational resistance,” it added, while noting that like others, the squatters had been offered full compensation for their properties, a free residential house lot and a grace period for the construction of their new homes. “These offers have been rejected on all fronts,” it said.
In its notice to the squatters, the ministry said more than 20 families have relocated to nearby residential areas and have built new homes through government compensation.
The MoHW says that the Mocha Arcadia squatters are in the path of a link for the Eccles to Great Diamond Highway, which is expected to ease traffic congestion for thousands along the East Bank Demerara
