INTERIOR Minister Christodoulos Christodoulou yesterday promised the future of the Akamas wilderness should be finally decided by this summer, a year after the verdict was officially due.
“My feeling is that the issue should be over by the summer,” Christodoulou, who is on the ministerial committee for Akamas, said after meeting to discuss the controversial issue with the chairman of the Technical Chamber (ETEK), Nicos Mesaritis.
On March 1 last year, the Cabinet announced a controversial decision to sanction “mild and controlled” tourism development on the unspoiled peninsula and gave the relevant ministerial committee, chaired by Agriculture Minister Costas Themistocleous, three months in which to thrash out a blueprint for implementing the plan. But Themistocleous recently launched yet another round of contacts with all interested parties.
Christodoulou conceded yesterday that a decision on the final status of the remote peninsula, earmarked for National Park status some 15 years ago, was long overdue.
The government appears loath to close the matter, wary of the demands for greater development from local residents and landowners and environmentalists’ demands for the March 1 plan to be scrapped in favour of a more protective regime.
The green lobby is supported by parliament and ETEK.
The Cabinet decision allows for “mild” development in all parts of the peninsula except the state forest and the Lara and Toxeftra turtle-nesting beaches. It also allows businessman Photos Photiades, alone among Akamas landowners, free rein to develop an area of forest land on the peninsula’s north coast.
Christodoulou was giving little away yesterday about which way the Akamas pendulum was swinging.
He repeated the standard government line that the need to conserve the peninsula’s wildlife had to be balanced with the need to help local villages develop. But he also said he “did not disagree” with ETEK’s stand on the issue.
Mesaritis repeated the conservationist line, insisting that protecting Akamas wildlife did not preclude development. But he said this development had to follow “a different model to the one we have become used to”.
Greens support implementation of a state-commissioned and parliament-approved 1995 World Bank report, which recommended Akamas be preserved as a ‘Biosphere Reserve’ with tourism development kept within existing village boundaries.
Mesaritis homed in on the greens’ bugbear: the March 1 plan’s special stipulations concerning Photiades’ land. The ETEK man said Akamas landowners should be given land outside the area to develop in lieu of their Akamas land.
Christodoulou said he felt this principle should be applied only if the Akamas land in question was environmentally “sensitive”. He did not say if the land the Cabinet plan allows Photiades to develop qualified as “sensitive” or not.
Photiades has been playing his own part in delaying a final decision on the March 1 plan by insisting his Akamas holding is twice the size of what Land Registry department records show.
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