Cyprus has turned into a tired old whore

OUR tourist industry has become tacky and is in a state of decay, mirroring a general malaise, a loss of love and respect for our island, few voicing a pride in being Cypriot any more.

When a country is truly beautiful like Greece with its 200 islands and many stunning peninsulas which the inhabitants adore and care for as the Italians do their manicured Renaissance cities of Florence, Sienna, Venice or Verona, and France their lush countryside, chateaux and cathedrals, what can we claim for Cyprus other than a stubbornly divided, rubbish-littered island suffering from tasteless over construction, incoherent planning and dubious building inspection procedures, deteriorating roads and few improvements in infrastructure to ease the flow of the rising number of luxury vehicles?

We say bitterly in the south that they (in the north) have taken the best part of the island; Kyrenia with its impressive castle and harbour, Famagusta with its Venetian walls and 13th century cathedral, Morphou with its miles of orange groves, Salamis with the island’s most important historic site and sandy coastline from there to the point at Apostolos Andreas.

And we accuse them of destroying the north by covering refugees’ land with quick build and selling them to foreigners. But judging by the many letters published over the past few weeks in the Sunday Mail, all without exception disparaging of our tourist and property industries on both sides, it seems we are finally on a downward spiral.

Have we turned Cyprus into an old whore, used and exhausted, many profiteering from this recent period of clueless over exploitation? Bravo I say to our Ministry of Finance as we, along with Malta, have met Brussels’ criteria for entering the euro next January.

And what will it mean other than an increase of between 5 and 15 per cent in our cost of living as was encountered by all member states on conversion? Never mind what our government tells us about price controls, they can’t even control traffic (street cameras instead of a visible police presence have given motor bikes and illegibly number plated roadsters a free grand prix through our cities every night) or clear the rubbish from our streets and parked cars from our patchy pavements.

Just look at the fiasco endured by most outpatients at the new General Hospital, the chaos that reigns in most departments of our administration. By meeting those criteria, our government has criminally neglected our infrastructure, industry, tourism and the creation of real jobs.

As more and more hotels close down, cheap labour (eternally at the mercy of a capricious Migration Department) loosely welds our economy together while we grow fat at desk jobs or driving lucrative taxis due to a pitifully inadequate public transport system. The capital is only now laying main drains in its crowded suburbs.

The Cyprob, this accursed impasse, overshadows all.

The price of land in the south has quadrupled over the past 10 years and made many non refugees wealthy beyond their dreams. And it’s this speculation that has destroyed us, ingrained as it is in the Cypriot psyche.

Today we live for tomorrow’s increase in the value of our land, satisfied it seems by the many hours of parochial television news that repeats ad nauseam the same old chestnuts. A people elect the government they deserve, one that has led us towards a permanent division of the island. Greek Cypriots see themselves as a single family, one people, indivisible under God.

And incest leads to blood line disorders and eventually, insanity. We are no more European in our outlook than the Israelis, and they invented Him and have built a high concrete wall to contain the aggressor. But rockets fly over that wall and land in their border towns.

Are they living in a prison compound? Are we and don’t yet realise it? I suppose we’re too busy spending our bank loans to notice as we slide obliviously into a state of isolationism not dissimilar to theirs. A Cyprob solution, no matter what it is, is our only way forward and essential to our children’s future survival.

The alternative is a selfishly aimless and self-destructive society. We are in dire need of an individual with vision, a voice capable of being heard above the din of those many divisive tacticians who have grown rich at the expense of the 200,000 refugees in the south and the 100,000 or so imprisoned in the north. We need an individual who is proud to be a Cypriot.

Does anybody know one?