Uncontrolled quarrying in the north continues unabated

Quarrying in the Pentadaktylos mountain range constitutes “rapacious development with very serious consequences on the natural environment”, Stelios Michael, director of the mines and quarries service, told Phileleftheros last week.

This was news only in the sense that the criticism came from the Republic of Cyprus, as opposed to environmentalists in the north.

“Quarries, which have become the bleeding wound of the country, continue to create a major environmental disaster,” began an article (Google-translated) in Yeniduzen newspaper back in April 2013.

The article quoted Hasan Sarpten, head of the association of biologists, who told the paper that the Pentadaktylos mountains, “the country’s most valuable environmental resource, are being destroyed in plain sight”.  

That was in 2013 – but not much seems to have changed.

Even the jokes are the same. Speaking in the recent Phileleftheros article, Antonis Latouros of the Cyprus Aggregates Producers Association – representing quarries across the Republic – quipped that, if this goes on, “in a few years, Nicosia hotels will be offering rooms with a sea view”!

Oddly enough, the same was said in 2014 by Turkish Cypriot politician Kudret Ozersay, who spoke on social media of the mountains being full of holes, adding: “It’s as if someone swore to bring a sea view and breeze to Lefkoşa!”.

Alas, this is no laughing matter – especially given the frenzy of development that’s overcome the north in the past few years. You only have to look at the clusters of brand-new high-rises in places like Trikomo (Iskele); and most of the materials for that construction come from the many quarries (more than 36) operating in the Pentadaktylos.

Partly, of course, this is just the way the world works. “If we didn’t have quarries, we’d have literally nothing around us,” Latouros told the Cyprus Mail, standing up for his members.

“We’d have no roads, no ports, no airports, no houses, no offices, no hospitals. We’d still be living in shacks.”

Yet quarrying is also the most obviously unsustainable kind of development, just because it takes away so unequivocally. Mountains are the ultimate limited resource. No matter what you do, that rock won’t be growing back again.

The situation seems to be getting worse – though the spike in extraction has so far been relatively small, compared to the spike in demand.

“There have not been any new full-time quarries recently,” Kemal Basat, director of the Cyprus Wildlife Research Institute – based in Vouno (Taskent), on the south side of the Pentadaktylos – told the Cyprus Mail. “But they are all working overtime now, with increased construction, so they are getting worse from that aspect.

“[The authorities] are also giving temporary permissions at random places, mainly for road-building material needs. These are not done with a lot of thought regarding their impact on environment and wildlife.”

Basat lists some of the problems caused by the quarrying – especially as regards his own area of expertise, which is wildlife.

“The biggest concern is obviously habitat loss, as these quarries are built on official forest land.

“Other than that, mainly seismic activity/noise pollution when they use explosives,” which they do “multiple times a week sometimes. A big concern, especially during breeding season…

“The second-biggest issue is with dust that’s generated by these quarries, goes airborne and accumulates on all plants and wildlife in the surrounding areas, causing all sorts of issues.” Hasan Sarpten of the biologists’ association put it even more succinctly in Yeniduzen, back in 2013: “The trees cannot breathe.”

That said, there’s a fine distinction to make here: the question of oversight.

After all, quarrying is hard on natural environments by definition. Quarries have been controversial in the Republic too, especially the one in Androlikou which has long been a bugbear of environmentalists fighting to conserve the Akamas. Indeed, if you go to the Cyprus Greens website, you’ll find an article from September 2018 with the provocative title: ‘Androlikou quarry, our own Pentadaktylos’.

“Anyone can say whatever they want,” scoffs Latouros. The hard reality, he says, is that “we in the Republic follow all the procedures laid down by European rules and regulations”, as well as submitting to regular inspections by the mines service and environment department.

The problem with the Pentadaktylos, in other words, isn’t the amount of quarrying but the fact that it’s uncontrolled. “An effective control system was targeted [i.e. planned] with the ‘Quarry Regulation’ that came into force in 2015,” says environmentalist Feriha Tel – but adds: “This is definitely not the case in practice.”

At the moment, it seems, if the mining companies were to slowly chip away the whole mountain – hence the jokes about ‘sea view’ – the ‘government’ in the north would be unable, or unwilling, to stop them.

What can be said about this situation, a possible disaster in the making?

The first, and most damning, observation is that years of hardline policies that rejected co-operation with the authorities in the north – because it’d be ‘unpatriotic’ to engage with them in any way – have left our own government with little leverage, and no obvious way of acting to save the Pentadaktylos.

The lesson (unlikely to be learned) is that we all live on the same small island, and working to protect our common environment isn’t just advisable but mandatory.

The second observation is to wonder why interested parties south of the Green Line are raising these issues at this particular moment – and the answer has to do with the Mia Milia crossing point, which the Turkish Cypriots wish to see open as part of confidence-building measures between the two sides.

So far, says Latouros, “materials haven’t been coming over from the occupied side”, despite being permitted by the Green Line Regulation, presumably because it’d be too expensive or time-consuming.

Mia Milia, however, is just down the road from the main quarries – raising, he says, issues of unfair competition if his members are forced to compete with unregulated quarries in the north.

More importantly, he adds, it would surely exacerbate the problem if demand for building materials were to increase even more, due to demand being created in the Republic.  

The EU has agreed in principle, says Latouros, that, since these quarries don’t operate according to EU rules, the materials produced there can be blocked from ‘import’ across the Green Line – but it’s up to the Cyprus government to police it. This (as opposed to any purely environmental concern) is why the destruction of the Pentadaktylos is once again in the news.

Latouros, unsurprisingly, is a big supporter of quarrying, so long as it’s properly regulated – and indeed, he claims, a recent study by the University of Cyprus (which will be presented there on June 19, with environmentalists also in attendance) shows that quarries actually increase biodiversity, at least once the ravaged environment has been restored. New, more diverse habitats apparently form, replacing those that were lost.

Others may look at it differently, wondering if this ‘bleeding wound’ – not just when it’s bleeding uncontrollably, as in the north, but even when being treated in EU-approved fashion, as it is here – is really worth all the destruction it causes.