Ali Al-Moussa

KUWAIT: The camping season came to an end on Thursday March 31, and Kuwait Municipality branches are set to start sending teams to remove violating camps starting from tomorrow. The municipality called upon camp owners to remove the camps in order to avoid forced removal and citations.

Meanwhile, Municipal Council Engineer Ali Al-Moussa criticized what he described as “several forms of violations against the Kuwait environment” committed during this year’s camping season, including lack of proper cleanliness standards. “While 90 percent of camps have already been removed, piles of waste and leftovers can be seen in the desert,” Al-Rai daily quoted Moussa yesterday. He further criticizes campers who failed to clean their camps’ sites before handing those sites over to the municipality following the end of the camping season.

Kuwait Municipality started in recent years to license camping sites in order to help protect the environment by receiving insurance payments from campers that are only refundable if the sites were left clean after the end of the camping season. Moussa said that regulating the camping process has been a ‘partial success’ on that regard, indicating that according to official statistics, the level of environment protection that it has achieved varied between 30 and 40 percent only. “In order to achieve better success, new laws and conditions must be implemented,” he said, suggesting that stricter punishments against violators are required.

By A Saleh