Criminal negligence

Every minister deserves to be in jail. By closing the Naameh sanitary landfill without an alternative in place, our politicians committed a crime that will continue damaging this country for years to come. And the calamity we are currently living through was predictable – in fact, we foresaw this. When residents near Naameh clogged Beirut’s streets with trash in January 2014, our elected officials decided to close it one year hence – with a possible three-month extension. In April 2015 (27 months later, or over a year after a ministerial committee had been tasked with organizing a tender to avert the current environmental catastrophe), the first competitive bids to manage solid waste in Lebanon’s post-war history closed. On July 17, 2015, so did Naameh. Chaos ensued. According to ministry of environment estimates (see story page 20), 99 percent of Lebanon’s garbage gets collected. Apart from the Sukleen service area and