By Peter Galuszka
Straying from the Virginia plantation, I’ve been noticing how Cyprus, a small historic island nation in the Mediterranean Sea, is once again acting the tail wagging the Euro-system dog and is affecting the finances of many farflung people.
The Euro-crisis has taken hold in tiny Cyprus, forcing such draconian suggestions as a tax on all bank accounts and account closings. The uncertainty, once again, has rattled global markets and is affecting the investments of millions, including mine.
The reality of Cyprus is that much of the hot money there, according to Joe Nocera of The New York Times, is from Russia where a paucity of rule of law encourages rich Russians to park their cash elsewhere lest it be confiscated by Vladimir Putin or who knows whom else.
Cyprus has long been a jumping off place for questionable Soviet or Russian activities for decades., be they illegal arms, drugs or dollars.
Example, back in the mid 1990s, when I was an American news correspondent in Moscow, I got to travel to Izhevsk, an industrial town in the central province of Udmurtia a couple of hours by air from the capital.
Izhevsk had been closed for many years to foreign visitors because it is the home of the Kalashnikov assault rifle and other vital defense plants. The city had something like five main factories where various forms of the venerable AK were made, although plenty were made under license in countries such as China, Romania and Poland.
The day my photographer and I got there, the city was in turmoil. A high ranking police officer and most of his family, including a couple of his children who were themselves police officers, were slaughtered at his birthday party by Kalashnikov-wielding thugs who broke into his apartment.
The police official was about to launch a major crackdown on the illegal gun trade that had gotten out of control when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. It was an open secret in Izhevsk that factory workers were siphoning off gun parts in their lunch pails, sort of like in the Johnny Cash song about the pilfered car, “Once Piece at a Time.”
Many of the gun parts ended up, you guessed it, in Cyprus, where underground plants reassembled the AKs for sale on the world market.
We stayed in town long enough for the funeral of the police officers which was attended by 30,000 people.
Mind you, this happened almost 20 years ago. What’s sad is that this kind of sleazy dealing is still going on between Cyprus and Russia and the rest of us are affected. One can’t help put think of the euphoria that came when the Euro was adopted and how it has turned out to be a total disaster.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.