{"id":68990,"date":"2013-04-01T15:57:37","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T12:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=68990"},"modified":"2013-04-01T15:57:37","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T12:57:37","slug":"a-devils-island-off-turkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2013\/04\/01\/a-devils-island-off-turkey\/","title":{"rendered":"A Devil\u2019s Island off Turkey"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Hermes SolomonPublished on March 31, 2013<\/span><\/h1>\n
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GIDEON John Tucker (1826\u20131899) was an American lawyer, newspaper editor and politician. In 1866, he wrote, \u201cNo man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session.\u201d
\nTucker\u2019s statement is certainly true of our legislature, who betrayed citizens by failing to observe laws governing our membership of the European Union. In turn, Cyprus was punished by the troika group, which comprises the European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB).
\nToday, the word \u2018betrayal\u2019 is on everybody\u2019s lips – demonstrators, bank employees and politicians to name but a few. But the hard facts of the Cyfi-prob suggest otherwise. Comparing President Nicos to Judas is unjustified.
\nI\u2019ve been living here for ten years and have yet to receive a straight answer to any question posed to officialdom. I initially put their evasiveness down to deviousness\/artfulness, but now suspect it might be due to excessive in-breeding and autism.
\nHistorically, our ancestors were known as scavengers of shipwrecks – our inlets\/harbours used as ports of convenience for pirates pilfering Ottoman seafaring wealth. The island\u2019s hillbilly farmers survived impoverished on scrubland, bedevilled by disease and plagues of locusts.
\nSince 330AD we were a people loosely unified under the guidance of the Greek Orthodox Church, and have, in 1700 years, failed to adapt to other than the spiritual. We are still living in trust of yesterday\u2019s Constantinople sustained by easily accessible dosh. After all, what else could our banks have done with those Russian billions other than chuck them at irresponsible scavengers at high interest rates who, like vultures, tore the corpse of this economy to shreds, failing abysmally to invest a single cent in the island\u2019s future and the security of our grandchildren?
\nOur past sins have now returned to haunt us.
\nMy book, Cyprus on the Rocks, published over two years ago, more than aptly presaged today\u2019s catastrophe. Even the title should have made the literate sit up and take notice. But which politician or economist predicted our own impending doom when we were gloatingly dispatching food parcels to Greece? The cost of fuel has doubled since, during which time our banks persisted in throwing somebody else\u2019s money at an already hugely financially overstretched populace?
\nThere are more black holes in our banking and financial services sector than in the entire universe – so many in fact that our legislature doesn\u2019t even know where to start. Numbers are meaningless; how to resolve bad banking practices and self-inflicted poverty, unanswerable.
\nHow much of depositors\u2019 deposits will be frozen. What will be the eventual limit on withdrawals from ATMs? Who will and who won\u2019t be permitted to transfer \u2018their funds\u2019 abroad in what was, up until recently, a \u2018free movement of capital\u2019 EU member state? And for just how long will restrictions last?
\nTen years ago, passenger ferry services from Piraeus to Limassol were abandoned. Cyprus, without realising it, became an island prison facing Turkey, like Devil Island in French Guiana.
\nThe illegal way out of the Republic is through Ercan Airport or Girne (No, not Tymbou and Kyrenia which, like Constantinople, no longer exist). Those of you with pots of cash at home, and who now hate Cyprus, please leave!
\nCyprus has been driven down the drain by powers beyond the ordinary man\u2019s control. She is now floating out to sea. But you could, like me, stay onboard and fight to drop anchor.
\nThe Attorney-general\u2019s job is to protect the innocent at the expense of the guilty and not permit those criminals to escape with their euros, gold bars or dollars to other tax free havens, which will shortly come under the scrutiny of EU officialdom anyway. Passports of all suspects responsible for this mess should be confiscated until an investigation into their presumed illegalities is satisfactorily concluded. This island must be sealed tight, and with the co-operation of the Turkish Cypriot authorities, flight of criminal phoenixes grounded.
\nIt is pointless arguing the legality of recent legislation – fighting for our human rights since 1974 has dug too many of us into the ground on both sides.
\nBut today\u2019s financial fiasco can in no way be compared to 1974. Today, we are stony broke with a declining tourist industry, virtually no manufacturing base and a bankrupt financial services sector.
\nWe must expect to be drip stolen of what money we have left by further devious legislation (taxes) and our banks. Our standard of living will fall rapidly to resemble that of Greece.
\nWe will endure eternal poverty if we continue sending our kids on the streets to demonstrate with placards insisting that the \u2018troika get out of Cyprus\u2019, we \u2018leave the Eurozone\u2019 and \u2018return to the Cyprus pound\u2019 – all nonsense and brainwashing by teachers who should know better.
\nBut where does the island\u2019s future lie? And that is the only question now worth asking and answering.
\nWe will never see the benefits from our gas wealth unless there is a settlement with Turkey over the Cyprob. We must solve the Cyprob yesterday for the sake of the economy tomorrow. This is the only way forward. Accepting a revised Annan Plan, precipitating closer ties with Turkey, will mollify both Israel and the US, even if it leads to weaker ties with Russia and Europe. We are, after all, central to the Near East, at present floating awkwardly in the middle of \u2018no-man\u2019s\u2019 sea!
\nAll nationalism has its price and we\u2019ve paid for ours many times over – 1821, 1931, 1960, 1974 and 2013. Enough is enough! Let\u2019s start living in the real world and stop living in the ephemeral (of no lasting significance) past! We have been staring in the wrong direction for far too long.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Hermes SolomonPublished on March 31, 2013 GIDEON John Tucker (1826\u20131899) was an American lawyer, newspaper editor and politician. In 1866, he wrote, \u201cNo man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session.\u201d Tucker\u2019s statement is certainly true of our legislature, who betrayed citizens by failing to observe laws governing our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":54926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[211],"tags":[7587,995],"class_list":["post-68990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyprus-trnc","tag-ecb","tag-imf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}