A FAMILIAR sight has returned to Karavostasi in Morphou Bay: the sea has turned orange again.
This was not supposed to happen.
Last year, a Turkish company, Doba Investments Limited, signed amid much fanfare a contract binding it to clean up the site of the abandoned Cyprus Mines Corporation (CMC) operation in the Lefka district and turn the area into a free trade port.
Until last winter it was customary for the sea at Karavostasi to turn an eerie orange every time it rained. But that did not happen this year due to Doba’s construction of a dyke preventing pollutants mixed with rainwater reaching the sea. Doba also installed a system that pumps the lethal mixture of slag and heavy metals back up the hill to one of 12 separation tanks previously used by the American mining operation to extract copper and gold from rock mined from the foothills of the Troodos mountains.
For some reason, however, and despite the fact there has been no rain since May, the sea at the mouth of the Lefka river is once again orange.
The colour of the sea is significant, and for the people of Lefka it is an irrefutable sign that the environmental disaster on their doorstep is no nearer to being cleaned up now than it was a year ago.
Lefka mayor Mehmet Zafer is scathing about what Doba have achieved in the 18 months since they signed the contract masterminded by the north’s current ‘foreign minister’ Serdar Denktash and then ‘economy minister’ Salih Cosar.
“The sea is orange and it’s not even winter,” he says. “I don’t think they know what they are doing.”
“All they have done is bury a number of barrels containing hazardous chemicals. This, I think, cost them around 500 million Turkish Lira (around £165).”
Doba have contracts issued by the north’s previous ‘government’ to create free trade ports in both Karavostasi and Famagusta, but before any development is carried out in Karavostasi millions of tonnes of toxic waste need to be either removed or detoxed and buried.
Zafer, however, believes Doba’s objectives for the CMC site are unclear.
“First they were talking about a free port, and then we heard about a refinery. Nobody knows what they are planning. All we see is that they have been taking apart structures on the site and selling them off as scrap. They even dismantled two bridges that were still in public use”.
Zafer says that following the threat of legal action, Doba promised to reconstruct the bridges – something it has yet to do.
Doba, incidentally, insists it has made “not a single penny” from the sale of scrap. But scrap metal is the least of Zafer’s worries.
“They are not doing the job properly, and I don’t believe that they will. They have pumped rainwater and pollutants into one of the separation tanks and this water is leaking into the ground,” he explains.
Doba director Hasan Hasan Karabey is adamant the picture painted by Zafer is inaccurate and that pumping waste into the disused separation tank is not the reason for the sea turning orange.
“The bases of the tanks are impermeable so nothing leaks through. If the sea is turning orange it is because of pollution leaking into the Lefka river further upstream,” he insists, adding that Doba’s project does not have the scope to eradicate all of CMC’s pollution problems.
Karabey agrees with Zafer on the need to clean up the site and the dangers the mountains of toxic waste present to human health, but there are fundamental differences in the way the two men believe the problem can be solved.
Karabey says it will be possible to seal off the waste from contact with air and water by covering over the 12 separation tanks with compacted clay, plastic and new topsoil. He also talks of introducing vegetation that will absorb many of the heavy metals present in the waste.
The main assumption of Karabey’s proposed method is that the bases of the separation tanks are impermeable.
“The bases were never impermeable, not even when they were new,” Zafer says.
Lefka Environmental Association president Hakan Oran backs Zafer.
“We told them not to pump water into the tanks because the bases are lined only with gravel. They are not at all impermeable, so the water filters through to the ground.”
Oran is also highly sceptical of Doba’s motives, which he believes are markedly different from those stated in the agreement signed between the company and the north’s administration 18 months ago.
“They [Doba] have a 49-year lease on the lands once used by the mine. I suppose they intend to market the area, but as what it is not yet clear.”
“We are suspicious,” Oran adds.
“There are things that suggest they are not completely serious in what they say they are trying to do.
“The first thing is that they have failed, even in the first 18 months, to stick to their programme. The second is that they have not involved us at all in any capacity. They prefer to work alone behind closed doors,” Oran says.
But Karabey insists this is not the case.
“We work with anyone who has the expertise to help us,” he says, adding, “People might claim we haven’t done enough, but we are the only people who have done anything here in the last 30 years, apart from looters.
“We’ve done massive amounts of research, including 4,000 cross-section soil analyses that are currently being analysed at laboratories in the Eastern Mediterranean University.”
Karabey says his company is, in fact, well ahead of schedule and that any ambiguity over what is taking place at the site has been caused by others involved in the project either pulling out or dragging their feet.
“When we took on the project we were approached by the Hellenic Mining Company (HMC) in the south. The idea was for us to send waste products from the plant up to Skouriotissa where they would be reprocessed, and the profit from metals extracted were to be split between their company and ours.”
Karabey says the project was to be supported by UNOPS (the United Nations Office for Project Services) as an example of bicommunal co-operation, but that HMC “suddenly pulled out”. He believes HMC’s sudden withdrawal could have stemmed from the fact that under the Annan plan CMC’s processing plant would have ended up under Greek Cypriot administration. Alternatively, he says, it could have stemmed from a French company’s report stating that reprocessing CMC’s waste products would not be economically viable.
Nevertheless, Karabey says he is still happy to work with HMC, but that he is no longer interested in carrying out mining-related operations in the area.
“Cyprus is too small a place for mining. What we have in mind is light industry and tourism.”
Whether or not HMC returns to the project, its departure has meant that UNOPS’ funding for the bicommunal project is no longer on the table. Doba have therefore turned their sights to the EU and are hopefully eyeing a possible injection of 259 million euros into the Turkish Cypriot economy.
“We project that the cleaning operation will cost around 14 million dollars. If we could get half of this from the EU we would be able to move a lot faster,” Karabey says.
Head of the EU delegation in Cyprus Adriaan van der Meer told the Cyprus Mail this week that there was a possibility that some of the money pledged to the north could be channelled into the cleanup operation at CMC.
But, regardless of whether it gets the EU money, Doba promises that the job will be done.
“By the winter of 2005 all the separation tanks at the CMC site will be covered and the site will be green,” Karabey says.
Watch his space.
