church demolished

church built by orang asli on own private land, with their own money, demolished by the jabatan hal ehwal orang asli (JHEOA)!!

now you see it…

now you don’t…

heard about it on 9 june from bob’s blog. he had a good chronoiogical narrative of the issue. then yesterday i saw it on some other blogs like what a lulu and poltics101,  and  also on malaysiakini,  new report entitled ‘pastor see red over church demoliton‘. (or read here). since there are extensive report there from bob and lulu, no point for me to repeat them. just hop over to their blogs to read, ya? you can also read. if you want to see lots of pictures, go to the gospel2poor website (the 2 pics here are taken from there).

to quote from bob (in his comments at lulu’s):

its’ JHEOA policy to assimilate the Orang Asli community to the mainstream Malay Muslim community. It has been so since 1961.

hmm… so was that why the church was demolished?  they could not get the orang asli to ‘masuk melayu’ er… also ‘masuk islam’ as they had ‘masuk christian’ instead. will the building be demolished if it had been a surau built by them if they happen to ‘masuk islam’?

anyway, suddenly today i read in malaysiakini ‘kelantan gov’t to rebuild church’.
gua musang distric officer kamaruddin awang told malaysiakini that the gov’t will build a new structure on another site and bear the cost of construction. he claimed that the church was demolished because the community had not obtained approval to put up the structure.

ahh i see. sorry, nothing to do with them being christians and not muslim eh. no approval to construct the building? really? even if really so, do they have to demolished the building?  anyway i thought it was mentioned that the headman had written to the authority for approval? here you can see a picture of the letter.

questions… questions… what are the answers? what is the truth?