Hidden behind Cyprus’ wall of opulence is a papier-mache infrastructure.
Accidents like the one at Evangelos Florakis naval base don’t just happen – they are caused.
Did we have to wait for 12 deaths and more than 60 injured to turn on this government – this three-year catastrophe of Christofias and his cohorts?
Subscribers to the Cyprus Mail website commentator columns have rarely been busier.
They are asking for heads to roll, and not just that of a 73-year-old Papacostas from the village of Yialousa, who should have been retired off well before he suffered a serious heart attack earlier this year.
Why he wasn’t is uppermost in our minds, especially those of the families who have lost loved ones.
I usually sleep peacefully at the Kalymnos Campsite, situated 350m from the Florakis naval base, indifferent to the manner in which this governments governs.
Well, not exactly indifferent, but resigned to the fact that Cyprus is ruled by a self-interested clique, old, over indulgent, mostly overweight, poorly educated, irresponsible and now seemingly unaccountable to anybody but themselves for what happened on that fateful crepuscular dawning of 11/7/2011.
Who put these pseudo aristocrats in place and keeps them there? We did and do. Who will permit them to get away with this criminal negligence and manslaughter – or, to use the words of a grieving father, culpable homicide?
We will. Who will continue to be indifferent and resign themselves to being governed by the yet-to-be-judged, who are all living the life of Reilly on fat future pensions, free private health care, backhanders and backslapping at the expense of taxpayers? I hope we don’t, because if we do, we deserve the utter contempt of the civilised world.
When decisions are not taken at the right time, fate always intervenes. Gamblers define fate as luck – good or bad.
But in this life luck belongs to those who make things happen, not those who sit on their arses, stuffing themselves, waiting.
In the case of the explosion of the containers at Florakis, an accident waiting to happen, Nature and chemical reactions played their part and took the decision for us.
The brushwood fire was probably caused by a conscript on night guard duty carelessly flicking a fag end onto the ground – the rest is now, unfortunately, history.
Amateurism is rife throughout all levels of government, no more so than at the very top, where our Commerce Minister Paschalides waffles indecisively on all matters, our Finance Minister Stavrakis tells one whopper after another, our president repeatedly neglects his responsibilities at home, his back covered by those three garrulous musketeers, Stephanou, Kyprianou and Evagorou, who drone on pointlessly in defence of the indefensible, expecting citizens to do or say nothing about the dire economic, social, military, structural and political state of this now sad island.
On that fateful morning I was awoken at 5am by a horrible grating sound, as if ship hulls were colliding together, and it went on continuously for over half an hour, eventually driving me outside to try to identify the source of the sound; barely daylight with a thick mist, sea fog, and visibility down to less than 50m.
When I returned inside to the kitchen minutes later to the familiar drone of an overhead aircraft there was the most almighty and unexpected explosion.
Two seconds after rushing outside, thinking the aircraft had crashed, the aftershock imploded car roofs, windows and doors – a tidal wave of destruction wrought throughout the entire campsite.
I screamed at my wife and son to get up and get out, but it wasn’t necessary, they and neighbours appeared immediately, running up and down the narrow road, trembling.
Then it rained crap, rather like it does in any disaster movie, and we knew it wasn’t the aircraft, which was still droning away happily, and concluded it must be Vassilikos power station, throwing out its filth as it has been allowed to do by successive governments for years now.
It wasn’t until an hour later that rumour spread that the arms dump had exploded, sending large chunks of shrapnel through windows.
We spent the day cleaning up the mess – broken glass everywhere, door and window frames hanging by a thread – finally getting the hell out of there and back to this hot hellhole, Nicosia, to be welcomed by power cuts and traffic jams.
I’ve been saying it for years – in fact shortly after I arrived here in 2003 – that this country seriously lacks sound infrastructure. Just look around at the filth and disorder, lack of pavements, empty buses, no crematorium, hooliganism, racism…
What’s happening now to this island is criminal.
There is no leadership, an appalling administration, no proper planning or any political solution to the Cyprob in sight. We’ve heard it all before and we’ll hear it all again, but to no avail, simply because we have nobody in the public or political arena capable of taking a decision and seeing it through. Given this, why are we paying them and exactly what are we paying them for – to destroy Cyprus?
Yes, I’m angry. That’s the first stage of grief and I’m grieving for the dead and this country both. I’m fed up with a government that does not govern in any proper way shape or form, with a president who only dreams
of becoming the President of the Council of Europe. But I hope that we, the people, will have him gone,
disgraced and dusted well before then, along with many of his cohorts.
Hermes Solomon’s book Cyprus on the Rocks is available from bookshops, priced €10
