ONE OF the last wildernesses left on the island is being threatened by the planned creation of a huge fuel terminal off the north coast, environmentalists and locals claim.
The Karpas peninsula has long been the sought-after jewel in the crown for investors hungry to exploit its sandy beaches, unspoiled maquis and carob-covered hills.
But fortunately for nature, politics have connived to keep the investors largely at bay, primarily because of the internationally-unrecognised status of the north, a factor that makes investors wary of parting with their cash.
But there has been some encroachment into the region, so far mostly by land developers who have littered the landscape with haphazard and ill-conceived villa complexes, and a spate of road building that has made the whole peninsula suddenly a lot more accessible. Then last year outrage erupted as environmentalists witnessed the opening of a 300-yacht marina in the village of Yialousa. Fearing the advent of mass tourism to one of the last vestiges of “old Cyprus” many saw it as the beginning of the end of the Karpas they had known and loved.
Today however, this area of outstanding natural beauty faces a threat perhaps more destructive than an invasion of package holiday tourists.
So far, this threat exists only on a piece of A3 paper laid out on a table in a tiny office in a supremely inauspicious district of north Nicosia. On the paper are lines and circles depicting what its designers say are the draft plans for a fuel terminal with a storage capacity of one million cubic metres of petrol, diesel or whatever type of hydrocarbon fuel is in demand. This facility, I am told by its part owner Turkish Cypriot businessman Mehmet Salih Karalim, will, pending final permission from the north’s authorities, be built on Karpas’ northern coast, near the village of Eptakomi, known in the north as Yedikonuk.
“Those who know about the project have no fear of it,” insists Karalim, adding what is presumably meant to be a rhetorical question: “Do you think the government would allow something that was not good?”
Despite his clearly unshakable belief in the project, Karalim is not a happy man. Last year, after months of negotiations, he was told he could not locate his fuel terminal on the northwestern coast near Lefka because the site he’d been offered was too close to a residential area and a hospital. Not to be deterred, he applied to for an alternative location, and was offered a strip of coast near Eptakomi. With no hospital or residencies nearby, Karalim thought there would be little or no objection.
He was wrong. As soon as the plans went public, tourism-based and environmentally-minded non-governmental organisations, along with some locals, began a campaign to stop Karalim and his mysterious Swiss-Turkish partner “Halis Bey” from building the terminal.
In the Nicosia office, one of Karalim’s colleagues shows me photos of a fuel terminal in Lithuania and tells me it is similar to one Karalim and Halis Bey plan to build.
“You see how safe this is,” says the colleague as he points to how close the Lithuanian terminal is to a residential area.
Safety is just one of the concerns troubling those who live in the area.
Ismail Cemal has been running an eco-tourism business in the nearby village of Komi Kebir for ten years, and has been nominated spokesman for the opposition campaign against the terminal. He believes its location, only a few kilometres from his village, will destroy his and others’ livelihoods.
“A few years ago the council of ministers declared this an eco tourism zone. Now they’re planning to allow this fuel terminal here. This is total hypocrisy,” he says.
“This will kill eco-tourism,” he adds.
As we stroll through the thick maquis and thyme bushes that cover the land perhaps soon to be under concrete, Cemal shows me how the land was terraced for farming in days gone by. Today there is little or no agriculture going on here, making it a wilderness second to none on Cyprus. Not a single house is visible anywhere on the wide-open skyline, and the only sound is birdsong, the breeze in the bushes and the murmur of waves on the shoreline – a shoreline that Karalim had described as “a useless place for tourism” and “just rocks”.
I try to imagine the now-pristine coast peppered with circular fuel containers, auxiliary buildings, trucks and oil tankers. It’s hard to envisage the benefits.
Karalim had told me the terminal would not aim to provide fuel for users on the island. In fact, none of the fuel imported is destined for local consumption.
“We’ll buy fuel from wherever it’s economical to buy from, and distribute to whoever and wherever wants to buy it,” the businessman said. The benefit to the local community would come from the 300 jobs the project will provide and spinoffs. The north’s authorities will apparently get “millions”.
“When a ship docks it’ll remain in port for a week. The 80 to 100 personnel will come ashore. They can’t spend money at sea, but here they’ll buy food in local shops, visit nightclubs, and stay in hotels to rest. When they leave they’ll buy food for the next ten days at sea. Whatever they need, they’ll buy in those local villages,” Karalim said.
According to the ‘mayor’ of Komi Kebir, Karalim and his team have offered the village one million US dollars a year if they refrain from objecting to the project. Unsurprisingly, Cemal and his fellow eco-tourism operators see this as “bribery”.
“It’s not going to be of benefit to anybody except the local authority which is deeply in debt,” he says, adding that the local authority “should find a way of solving their financial problems without destroying the environment and threatening the future health of our children.” Nevertheless, the mayor has already begun promising jobs to villagers if they play ball, I’m told.
I ask Cemal if he thinks local politicians are taking kickbacks from the company in return for cooperation. His reply is that while he has no proof “it’s fair to use a Turkish expression saying that the one who handles the honey licks his fingers”.
It is not only eco-tourism that is at stake here. More important perhaps is the loss of yet more of the fragile natural and biological richness of the area and Cyprus as a whole.
Serife Gunduz, a lecturer and researcher at north Nicosia’s Near East University (NEU) says that building the fuel terminal in the region will have disastrous consequences for rare species of marine life such as the Mediterranean seal and turtles, both of which nest along the coastline.
“There is no way these endangered species won’t be disturbed by the increase in shipping and will very likely stop nesting in the area altogether,” she said.
Despite Karalim’s insistence that his facility will use only the latest storage and transportation technology, Gunduz fears the groundwater and farmland around the terminal will be contaminated by fuel vapours and leaks.
At a projected cost of 500 million US dollars, the Eptakomi fuel terminal, if ever built, will undoubtedly bring vast changes to this breathtakingly beautiful spot. What the people of north Cyprus will have to ask themselves is, is worth it?
