brother wrote:Unfortunately the same goes for my grand parents, parents and other family homes, all demolished and i remember them and they were some of the best buildings not mud huts.
Which area is this brother?
brother wrote:Also may i add that the GC admin for years now have chosen to build roads almost always through TC lands....why?
Not almost
always through TC lands. A highway from Pafos to Limassol is impossible to pass from TC land only. This is not feasible unless we assume (something completely stupid,) that all TC properties were aligned along the same nearly straight-line form Pafos until Limassol. This is an obvious exaggeration.
However I will not dispute that proportionately perhaps more TC land was utilised for public projects than GC land. I.e, if the TC private land in the free areas is 10% of the total area and the GC private land was 62%, and if we assume that 10 sq. Kms of private land were utilised for such projects, perhaps 1/3 of this was taken from TC land and 2/3 from GC land. There are reasons for that Brother, not that I necessarily agree with them.
The simplest reason is that when the government decides to make a public project and consequently expropriate land, there are a lot of disputes, objections and legal actions by the affected citizens that almost always end up causing many delays in the implementation of the project. In the case of TC properties, the owners are not there (present) to challenge the decisions of the government and therefore it is more convenient to use, when it is possible, TC land in order to forward the project more quickly. It only requires an announcement in the official gazette, which most likely TCs will not notice and then the expropriation is legally validated.
However, I was reading some statistics about some time ago (perhaps a year or so,) that only 1.2% of all the private TC properties were used for such purposes. If we take into consideration that the total area of TC private properties in the south is about 553 sq. kms, the 1.2% will be equal to 6.64 sq. Kms or about 4,960 donums or 6.63 million square meters of land, a figure that seems quite logical since the government could build a very huge amount of projects in such area. Even if we assume that each donum is valued at let’s say 20,000 on the average (one has to consider that within this land there will also be a lot agricultural land, which is valued between 5-10,000 pounds,) Then we are talking for about 100 million Cyprus pounds. This figure is well within the capacity of the RoCy in order to compensate the TC owners when it will be required to do so. Even if this figure is doubled it will still be well within the governments ability to do so. TC should not be worried for such a thing as there is no way, once a solution is achieved, to ever loose there money.
To the contrary, GCs are truly and rightfully concerned with the sale of their private land in the north, which in some areas, coincidentally the most expensive ones like Kyrenia, has reached, as it seems to most of us, nearly 50% of it. Lapithos is a typical example were no GC will manage to take even the 1/3 that A-plan provided, unless it is some worthless peace of land that has no potential for investment in which case it will not worth a lot either. A lot of this land has be given to settlers or TC who do not have an equivalent in value land in the south, which in their Turn have sold them to the developers who build houses for foreigners. Now, if the initial sellers have no money or equivalent property to exchange, who will compensate the GCs? Especially if those initial sellers decide to run away, like most settlers will presumably choose to do.
Conclusion. If TCs, from a scale of 1 to 10, are entitled to worry 1 degree then GCs are entitled to worry 10 degrees.
brother wrote:recently it came to light that a TC who was selling his land in the south was stopped when the GC admin decided to take action and make it into a park....why?
If he was ever living in the north and coincidentally or presumably was or could have been given GC land in the north, which he either sold or could /can sell any time, then he was rightfully stopped from selling his land in the south. I respect TCs rights but under the circumstances we live for these last 30 years, there is not other choice, unfortunately.
TCs need to understand that the TC properties in the south are only 28% (area wise) of the GC properties left in the north. Value wise they are estimated to be only around 15% of the corresponding GC private land in the occupied. If TCs after selling most of the GC land in the north, come in the south and start selling theirs too, were are we going to end?
As for the demolished houses brother, do not get so exited. The value of a 35 or 40-year-old house within a plot situated in a city or any village, probably represents less than 1/10 of the total value of the entire property. GCs will still be most happy if, after all their houses in the north are demolished, the land is given back to them. Because that is were most of the value is situated and not on a 40 years old house which most probably, should it be given back to the owner, he will in fact demolish it alone by himself and build something bigger, more modern or more productive.
