MAKKAH —The Makkah Municipality is to ask the province's Emir Prince Khaled Al-Faisal to protect its employees after they suffered a series of attacks by Saudi citizens, business daily Al-Eqtisadiah reported Tuesday quoting a municipality source. He said: “The municipality intends to submit a formal letter to Prince Khaled Al-Faisal requesting him to protect employees cracking down on encroachments on government and private lands against assaults by citizens that have increased lately.” The source revealed the municipality had stopped its land encroachment employees from going out in the field until they are given sufficient protection. He said last week a municipality employee was badly beaten by seven Saudi citizens and was in hospital receiving treatment. “We will not be able to do our job if we are not fairly protected.” A number of citizens noted that assaults on municipality employees have become a trend that has to be dealt with immediately. They said the attacks against government employees were not acceptable for any reason. The sources believed numerous loopholes in the rules and regulations governing the protection of government employees have encouraged citizens to intimidate municipality staff. One citizen said: “Some of the land encroachers have become so bold that they prevent any vehicle carrying the municipality's logo from coming near them.” Hassan Khankar, chairman of the Al-Umrah branch municipality, said he has become suspicious of police who accompany inspection teams. “When an employee was attacked last week, the 20 officers accompanying our campaign did not move to save our colleague. “They just kept quiet watching the incident.” Khankar made it clear that he was not accusing police of complacency but said these attacks were happening frequently. He said: “I am a government employee and quite aware of the duties and responsibilities of my job, but I cannot hope to stop any encroachment if proper protection was not provided to me.” He noted that land encroachment operations in his municipality cover all districts. “Regardless, I prevented my employees from going out to stop these encroachments unless they were properly protected.” Muhab Abadah, chairman of the Al-Shawkiyyah branch municipality, said citizens in his jurisdiction would not hesitate to stop any vehicle carrying the logo of the municipality even if it had nothing to do with land encroachments. “On many occasions stones were thrown at our cars for no reason other than that they had the municipality logo on them.” He said many of the lands confiscated by the encroachers belonged to the government or well-known citizens. He said: “These lands were easy prey for encroachers because their proprietors left them unattended.” He said his employees were able to stop more than 380 encroachment attempts over the past two years. Dr. Faial Al-Sharif, undersecretary of the engineering college at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah, said land encroachments was a complicated issue that could not be resolved easily. “The issue must be resolved through dialogue with the encroachers to reach a compromise.” He said the government lands that had been seized illegally by citizens were too large to regulate. “The encroachers have already built on these lands. “Nobody will be able to kick them out easily so rational and acceptable solutions must be sought.”
