When 73-year old Wahidah Md Salleh was evicted from the home she had lived in for more than 50 years, she inadvertantly became a rallying symbol of the struggle of KLites resisting corporate urban renewal and gentrification.
The religious teacher’s home village of Kampung Chubadak Tambahan, Sentul, was declared by the Kuala Lumpur High Court in 1998 to have belonged to the people who started the village. Under the terms of that court ruling, the people residing on the land would need to have been compensated with an amount equal to the value of their settlement, should the area ever be earmarked for development.
By 2008, however, Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL) had listed Kampung Chubadak Tambahan as one of six villages in the city declared squatters’ settlements, or kampung setinggan, and thus fair game for summary demolishment and redevelopment.
When DBKL demolition crews began tearing down her home last Monday, a photo submitted to the The Malay Mail by Zurairi AR of Wahidah defiantly opposing a City Hall tractor with her fist held up in the air became something of an online sensation, and even ended up being adapted into a poster titled “Capitalist Bastards”.
The Malay Mail Online has more on her story.
(Note: an earlier version of this article attributed Wahidah’s photo to The Malay Mail writer Zurairi AR. Zurairi himself clarified that while he submitted the photo to the newspaper, the original photographer is still unknown.)
Reader Interactions