People from Kuwait plan to build four large Arab colonies in the north Bohemian village of Modlany, as the nearby Teplice spa has become highly popular among them, but the locals are concerned about noise and mess, daily Mladá fronta Dnes (MfD) writes today.
The foreigners bought more than 60 land lots in the Czech village, and they plan to build houses, in which they would spend the summer spa season. The locals might find new jobs because the Arab houses would need to be maintained for the rest of the year, the paper writes.
“This might be a disaster for our quiet village,” Modlany Deputy Mayor Karel Secký told MfD.
Secký said the locals fear that they might have the same problems as people living in the center of Teplice who complain about heaps of waste produced by hundreds of Arab spa clients picnicking in the park and about noise in the night hours.
The paper says Arabic signs asking the foreigners, mostly from Kuwait, Libya and Saudi Arabia, to use waste baskets have not helped, and even representatives of the local Muslim community have had to start appealing to them during the regular prayers. Moreover, special leaflets are distributed, and police patrols are accompanied by interpreters.
“But we don’t have any police in our village. How would we deal with it?” Modlany Mayor Stanislava Kondrlová said.
“They are from a completely different culture, and I am concerned about their coexistence with our citizens,” she said about the land owners from Kuwait.
Modlany authorities cannot ban the construction of houses on the land that the Arabs bought.
This summer, the Teplice spa has had so many clients that its accommodation capacity is full, and the Arabs rent flats in villas and prefab houses, MfD writes.
Marei Abbas, from the Teplice Muslim community, said the Arabs coming to the spa want to live together, not each family separately.
Modlany has a nice environment and it is close to Teplice, and this is why they have chosen the place, Abbas told the paper.
Abbas said the foreigners were pleasant and rich people who would spend a lot of money and build beautiful villas in which they want to live two or three months a year.
The locals may earn money from the maintenance of the empty villas during the rest of the year, he said.
Abbas said it is unclear when the houses would be built, because the administrative process took very long in the Czech Republic. He said the villas might be completed in about five years’ time.
Some of the locals would like to buy a strip of land next to the planned Arab district in order to plant high trees there that would form a kind of barrier, MfD writes.
But Iveta Petrová, whose family does business with Arab clients, told MfD that the Czech who complain most about the Kuwaitis are those who don’t have any money.