I had a chance to visit the UN-controlled buffer zone [not the city mentioned in this article] well over a decade ago when I stayed with some soldiers over there. In the buffer zone is the old Nicosia airport, complete with 1970s planes sitting at a disused terminal. There's also a car showroom which is preserved with new (1974 season) cars. You can't wander about much since the whole area is mined and they warn you not to walk off the paths or to touch any "unusual" objects on the ground. I have photographs, but they're on film so I'm going to have to get them digitized some time ...
Our goal was to traverse the entire city, and to then rooftop a hotel on the beach.
The military presence is very real, and the city has a beautiful "slipping back to nature vibe" to it. We typically imagine that cities will decay into jungles, but curiously enough, it's the slow spread of garden species plants growing bigger and establishing more foothold.
Absolutely.
The Turkish army occupy a few buildings on the "main road", with regular patrols, floodlit streets, etc.
When we were there, there was also a UN presence, about 1km down the road from the Turkish HQ.
There's a constant flux of hardware (tanks, etc) in the area: 35,122934, 33,950381 / https://binged.it/2IlXXAV - which we saw rumbling around a bit.
At strategic points throughout the entire city there are watchtowers, some of which that are very, very well placed (impossible to see them before they see you)
Now that the city is occupied by the Turks, why haven't they used it? It's a bit late now (and many buildings are no doubt no longer safe), but why didn't they use it then? There's a lot of investment in the structures in the city.
Turkish never intended to use the city, actually army didn't want to push this far neither. When they were able to, they just wanted to use Varosha as a bargaining chip to keep Turkish population in north safe in the negotiations -since city was important for Greek Cypriots-
> What's holding back this city from being resettled by it's rightful owners?
Its "rightful owners" are greek cypriots. During the invasion of Cyprus in 1974 it became part of the turkic-occupied sector, but rather than resettle it Turkey set it aside as a bargaining chip assuming negotiations would begin soon.
So what's holding back this city from being resettled is that it's a forbidden zone regularly checked on by military patrols.
Well. These buildings as well as the tens of thousands of buildings in the "Occpied zone" have lawful owners. In civilised societies items often have owners - in the case of important items such as a beach-line hotel in a seaside resort, the ownership is accompanied by a document called a "deed".
These buildings have owners, who can produce those deeds, yet the owners are denied ownership. This did not happen (and is still happening up to this day) through a purchase or another legal act, but through violence, so I call it robbery. This is what it is.
You are not clearly communicating what you mean in your original post. Do you think the TC's are robbing? The GC's? I am not sure anyone is talking about resettling Varosha, so I don't really understand your point. In any case, the is no _money_ to resettle Varosha should the Cypriots every get it back.
What's holding back this city from being resettled by it's rightful owners?
The fact that it's caught in the middle of a conflict between two armed groups who hate each other with an intensity that's almost impossible to grasp?
Greeks and Turks have a lot of nasty history with each other. If you don't want to dig into all of it, just go read the Wikipedia article on the history of Cyprus.
Political and national flamewar is not ok on HN, and your comments in this thread—especially this one—are bannable offences.
I'm not going to ban you, because your account doesn't have a history of doing things like this. Edit: well, it kind of does, since your comment before this thread was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16017418. Please don't post like this! Comments like that and your ones in this thread turn HN into a battlefield. We don't want that—scorched earth is not interesting, and the goal of this site is to be interesting.
Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart when commenting here. That means avoiding flamebait and flamewars, and posting civil, substantive, thoughtful comments only. If you can't or don't want to do that, please don't post until you can and do.
Does "cockroach" refer to the nationality or to the ideology (cockroachism) and its followers? There is plenty of Turkish people who in no way deserve this moniker - this is obvious.
The ones on Cyprus, preventing the locals from even having a peek at their lawful properties, literally at gunpoint, the ones on the Navy ships bullying the Italians, the ones in Constantinople blackmailing Europe and the millions who support them are most certainly cockroaches though.
No discussion of legality can be complete without mentioning the July 1974 coup, and the Greek government's role in it. This willfully provocative act destroyed any possibility of consensus.
There is a nuance between first and second operations in July and August. While occupation in second operation is pretty much an over reaction, first one was quite legal and necessary from the Turkish point of view. Greek state was in a turmoil and nationalists were trying to 'get the Cyprus back'.
I see no nuance. Turkey used the situation to further their own agenda. They have stayed in Cyprus long after their presence could possibly be justified.
Erdogan pulled the same trick to cement his authority with the recent 'coup' in Turkey.
Sorry, none of them were legal. This was pure and simple the idea of the Turks being unhappy with Greek Cypriot rule. Source: lived in Cyprus for 5 years.
Wasn't there terror attacks against British and Turkish on the island -not only on Turkish people, Greeks felt like island 'rightfully belonged to them' -? Wasn't there attempts to unite island with Greece at times by the both Greek and Cypriot nationalists ? There was a guaranteering agreement precisely for this reason and Turkey used his rights.
Everybody knows that - for the same reason Putler invaded Crimea and Hitler - Czechoslovakia.
The true reason for all three "operations" was to turn the blue squares on the map into red ones.
And spliting the "operation" into "the first few weeks" (which might be justifiable) and the following "several decades" (which are impossible to justify) is I believe insulting readers' intelligence way more than the stupid turkroach meme.
In the times of Cold War, Cyprus was an important base for NATO and UK therefore to keep them there with none-to-low amount of legitimacy it was beneficial to keep Cyprus somehow divided.
There are also 'conspiracy theories' that British intelligence had agenda of creating unrest intentionally on the island so they can keep the bases, but that sounds too much of 4d chess, since this unrest led into Greece leaving military part of NATO and made western alliance look shaky against USSR.
Edit: Found an Atlantic article with much better photos than mine: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/04/frozen-in-time-the...