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Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry said it was pushing through with its plan to demolish 168 villas illegally constructed in a conservation area inside the Halimun Salak National Park in Bogor.

Darori, director general for forest protection at the ministry, told the state-run news agency Antara that the government would send letters to the villa owners informing them of the plan within seven days.

The ministry is working in coordination with the West Java government on the operation.

“Sometime next month, all those villas need to be destroyed,” Darori said.

Experts from different government agencies have approved the plan, saying the presence of the villas was harming the surrounding park.

Those agencies include the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the National Police, the Attorney General’s Office, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), the Home Affairs Ministry and the National Land Agency (BPN).

“We discovered that the owners of land located in the conservation area had no legal documents. The KPK will start investigating the local BPN,” Darori said. “The bottom line is that the houses in question have harmed the surrounding national park. That’s why these villas need to be demolished.”

Earlier this month, Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan said his office would look into issue of luxury villas built inside the Halimun Salak National Park.

About 20 years ago, state-owned forestry company PT Perum Perhutani swapped 250 hectares of land inside the park with the Veterans Foundation, in exchange for land in Subang, West Java. The land in Subang, however, was never handed over to the state enterprise.

Berry Nahdian Furqon, executive director of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), said the Forestry Ministry should take an aggressive lead in investigating the land swap and the construction of the villas, and come down hard on anyone found to have violated the law.

“This only gives merit to the belief that the ministry has failed to give serious and proper attention to conservation areas, particularly illegal transactions and the construction of these luxury villas that are mostly owned by businessmen, celebrities, government officials and even local officials,” Berry said.

Under the 1990 Law on Conservation Areas and the Ecosystem, anyone building a house in a conservation area without the proper legal documents can be fined up to Rp 5 billion ($535,000) and sentenced to 10 years in prison.