After the pathetic answer of the UN-Habitat offices, without any substantial agumentation, the friends of UPC answer: We also could not find any reasonable relations between "UN-HABITAT projects of some US$25 million under the post-tsunami reconstruction" with the award for Jakarta, as the tsunami happened in Aceh, Sumatera. After learning from the great effort carried out by UN Habitat on post-tsunami reconstruction, we could come to the conclusion that the scroll of honor should not go to the city of Jakarta but to UN Habitat itself.

Adequate Housing is Right of every woman, man, youth and child, says Special Rapporteur on World Habitat Day. The selection of Jakarta, Indonesia as the centre for this year’s World Habitat Day serves to highlight the enormous devastation and homelessness resulting from the 2004 tsunami. The recent Hurricane Katrina that hit the United States also exposed the lack of disaster-preparedness and failures in state response. Both the Asian tsunami and the Katrina disaster have revealed the grossly inadequate housing and living conditions under which historically marginalized groups, such as the African-American population in the United States and certain indigenous peoples in Indonesia and India have survived for decades.

Governor Sutiyoso has become infamous for his brutal and massive evictions of the houses of the urban poor and the confiscation of their means of livelihood like pedicabs and the goods and stalls of sidewalk vendors.

We cannot understand why UN Habitat gives this award to the City of Jakarta. The leading authorities are well known as example for the miss-use of the "city without slums"-approach. Cleaning the cities from the poor by evictions, excluding street vendors etc. is not what we understand by rights-based urban development.