Cyprus, NATO’s unsinkable aircraft carrier. In the below video you can see how the island of Cyprus became divided through ethnic conflict and Western intervention.
Cyprus officially called the Republic of Cyprus, is an island country in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia.
It is the third-largest and the third-most populous island in the Mediterranean, located south of Turkey, west of Syria and Lebanon, north of Israel, the Palestinian region of the Gaza Strip and Egypt, and southeast of Greece.
Starting as far back as 1571 when the Ottoman conquest changed the demographics of the island, all the way up until the 1974 invasion the Greeks and the Turks of the island never quite managed to live together in harmony.
This ethnic tension was made worse by the Cold War, and Cyprus became caught up in the world of geopolitics, in which it occupies an incredibly strategic position.
A United Nations peacekeeping force has been operating in Cyprus for over 50 years – the longest-running UN force of all time. Nicosia is the last divided capital city in the world.
As of yet, all attempts and negotiations to solve the dispute have failed. One can only hope that the situation is solved sooner rather than later, and without any further violence.
