By Athena Karsera
SPECIALLY trained police units could be introduced to tourist areas in the framework of new laws to go before the Cabinet by the end of the year, Tourism Minister Nicos Rolandis said yesterday.
Rolandis said the officers would be schooled in handling problems common to tourism areas, but said he believed recent press reports on sex, drugs and anarchy in Ayia Napa had been exaggerated.
Politis on Tuesday and yesterday printed front-page stories on the decadence of the popular resort, which has this year been flooded by clubbers and dubbed the new Ibiza.
Using explicit photographs taken during a visit to Ayia Napa, the paper said tourists were indulging “oral sex competitions, complete with running commentary by a master of ceremonies and applause from an enthusiastic crowd.”
The paper said the owners of bars where the ‘competitions’ took place blamed the tour operators representing them for advertising their establishments as providing this type of ‘entertainment’. Some owners complaining of such incidents said they had been told that the tour operators would simply take their business elsewhere.
The paper also reported that the undermanned police force in the area seemed to be turning a blind eye to tourists taking drugs in public, racing rented motorcycles in the streets and urinating on doorways.
Rolandis said yesterday that action should be taken wherever the law was broken, adding that the problem was within the jurisdiction of the police, not his Ministry.
“There are some problems there. If the laws are being broken, evidently from what was published, measures have to be taken to mend the situation. I have approached the Cyprus Tourism Organisation to be especially aware of this problem even though the CTO does not have the executive authority to intervene in these cases.”
The minister said that by the time cases involving tourist crimes arrived before the courts, “the summer is over and the profits from all these activities have already been obtained and in the end, a fine is given that is insignificant to those that have to pay it.
“For this reason, in the new tourism laws we have prepared and which will be presented to the cabinet in the second half of this year, we included not only the creation of tourism police, which will be able to handle these problems, but also increased the police’s power so that they can stop what is going wrong.”
In the meantime, Ayia Napa shop owners and residents said they would prefer more quality tourism.
Elias Asparou, the president of Ayia Napa’s Leisure Centre Association yesterday said that many of the tourists flocking to his town were undesirable.
“Definitely the (tour) companies in the last years have been trying to convey the tone they want, and they send us tourists who are very often unwelcome.”
Asparou said he did not know who had organised the erotic displays, “But I believe the CTO and the police have to stop these things or draw a line saying ‘Up to here and no further.’ We want this evil to stop in Ayia Napa because we want quality tourism.”
He said that the clubbers spent only two to three months of the year on the island. “If we let the youth rule this place then the season will shrink because what happens in the other months April, May, September, October?”
Asparou said quality tourists would be scared away, “because they will hear Ayia Napa is a den of sin, that they won’t be able to sleep or rest etc.”
