AS I round the bend of the road leading out of Yialousa I remember the first time I saw this view. It was the mid-1980s and the sun-blasted village shimmered in the summer heat over the sparkling Mediterranean. Old men sat on Van Gogh chairs outside the coffee shop staring into the middle distance, and barefoot kids had chased our car through the dusty streets shouting “Allo! Allo! Bye Bye!”
Today, the old men are still there, but the children no longer chase cars. There are just too many of them. Not only are there more cars, there are huge lorries carrying ready-mix concrete, and I am stuck behind two of them. They belch exhaust fumes over the old men at the coffee shop and block my view of the coast road leading east towards the end of the Karpas peninsular.
I often travel this road, and over the years have witnessed the wanton destruction of breathtaking landscapes by property developers out for a fast buck from foreign tourists too stupid to know better. Ugly villas, many of them half-built and abandoned, line the coast road all the way from Kyrenia to Yialousa and beyond.
Back in 2004, I was introduced to a Turkish Cypriot businesswoman named Sidika Atalay. Along with her then-business partner Asil Nadir (now facing fraud charges in the UK) she had drafted a plan for a marina she said she wanted to build outside Yialousa. She proudly showed me her Port Barbaros project on paper, telling me her belief that a marina would enhance, rather than detract, from the natural beauty of one of Cyprus’ most remote corners. It was hard to be enthusiastic. Soon after, Atalay sold the project for a rumoured 10 million dollars to British businessman David Lewis, the head of the UK-based Lewis Trust Group (LTG).
Six years later, Lewis’ project is nearing completion. A “soft” opening is scheduled to take place later this month, when the 300-vessel marina itself will be open to yachters. A restaurant and bar will also be opened then, with one of the hotels and the casino opening later in the year.
I have returned to the site to meet Liza Singer, Lewis’ representative for this project. It is no longer called Port Barbaros – Lewis changed its name to Karpaz Gate Marina. But like Atalay, Singer is big on the environmental benefits she thinks the marina will bring to the area.
“This development speaks with the environment, compliments the environment,” she says, adding: “The materials are natural; the systems are as green as we could make them”.
She goes on:
“This is a planned development. This is pre-planned and pre-approved from the architecture to the material and the systems. If every development was done in this way, the environmentalists would have no work.”
I ask Singer whether the development of such a large marina, along with two luxury hotels, a casino, bars and restaurants, is compatible with the proposed establishment of a national park very close by. (Environmentalists in the north have been trying to pressurise the authorities to finally ratify a national park law for decades.)
“It is a national park!” she insists. “It is the same, and will stay the same, and we will be the first ones to support the fact that it will stay that way, because this is what we are marketing, what we are promoting. This is untouched and unspoilt.”
The “national park” Singer is referring to is the tiny piece of scrubland between Apostolos Andreas and the most eastern tip of the peninsula. Several years ago the Turkish Cypriot authorities erected a fence and a sign declaring the area “protected”. In reality, nothing is protected.
The north’s environmental protection office later proposed a far more extensive national park extending from a few kilometres east of Yialousa, taking in the village of Rizokarpaso and all the land up to the tip of the peninsula. Sadly, the documents proposing this lie gathering dust in a “pending” box at the Turkish Cypriot ‘parliament’. No one, it seems, has the guts or the will to bring the issue up these days.
The question has to be, why not?
Head of the north’s Green Action Movement (GAM) Dogan Sahir is convinced the Turkish Cypriot authorities have long abandoned the national park idea and have secretly earmarked the area for touristic development.
“Why has the government provided electricity for 20,000 people in an area designated as a national park?” Sahir asks rhetorically. The provision of such large-scale electrical infrastructure enraged environmentalists in 2008 when the plans emerged. Many opposed it, but the plans went ahead regardless.
“We fought against this but lost,” Sahir says, but speaks of plans to take the protest to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The Turkish Cypriot court told Sahir and GAM in February that they had “no right” to oppose the authorities.
Sahir says he has also heard from architects in the north that plans have been submitted for the building of a hotel on the pristine Golden Sands beach near the Apostolos Andreas monastery. In fact, he says, “seven major hotel chains are scouting the area”.
“The whole of the Karpas Peninsula is under threat,” he says. “This would be a colossal disaster”. But it would explain why the authorities have taken electricity for 20,000 to Karpas.
“The marina is the start of something. It is like the bringing of electricity to the area. Once you lay the infrastructure, other things follow,” he says.
As for the marina itself, Sahir is not in the least impressed by its developers’ talk of environmental best practice. Its construction, he says, will have damaged the habitats and breeding grounds of the Mediterranean seal and the Mediterranean Garoupa fish, both of which are close to extinction. This information Sahir says he has gleaned from local fishermen and divers.
Yet unlike Sahir, people in Yialousa see the development more in economic than environmental terms.
“Of course we are happy. Let them build hotels. We’re unemployed,” says village muhtar Ozay Oykun.
According to Oykun, Yialousa and the other Karpas villages have “the highest unemployment rate in the whole of Cyprus” and that without such developments the village will die as young people leave in search of employment.
He accepts however that the project will have an environmental impact, and that unless existing laws are implemented, the natural beauty of the area could be in jeopardy. He insists however that people come first.
“You have to put people first. The environment comes second. You have to be well off to protect the environment,” he insists.
But one has to wonder whether a marina, hotel and casino will really bring wealth to these villages. Sahir believes not.
“They say they’re going to bring employment. They said the same at Bafra [a tourism complex near Bogazi], but they bring their own workforce from abroad. They have one or two locals working in the garden or as refuse collectors,” he says.
The main intention is to open a casino, he says, referring to a business activity notoriously non-beneficial for local development.
“The money they’ll earn from the marina in a year they will make in the casino in one night. It’s all lies,” he says.
Although Sahir and other environmentalists base their predictions on previous experience, there are things about this development that make it different. First of all, it is the only large-scale foreign investment in the northern part of the island. As Singer says, “It’s a bone fide investor”.
Indeed, Singer’s boss is bone fide. As the Lewis Trust Group’s website says, “The Group has grown, from its post-war retail roots, into one of the UK’s largest privately owned companies. The group has worldwide interests in retailing, leisure, financial services and property and now employs over 10,000 people”
It’s hard to understand, then, why such an established company would want to risk investing where others have, and still do, fear to tread. Singer appears confident, and brushes aside anxieties that the Cyprus government in the south will resort to legal action to oppose the development of so much occupied Greek Cypriot land.
“We are talking about an honest developer who is coming with his experience and money and knowledge to built a touristic development and introduce a new sector to a remote part of the island for the benefit of the island as a whole, with the vision that a prosperous north will lead to a prosperous, peaceful island,” she says, offering a political spiel she has learnt well.
“The political issues are beyond and above him, but we believe that by creating such a development we are contributing to a solution, and not the other way round,” she says.
