Koral Bozkurt, Turkish Cypriot ruling party the UBP’s candidate for the town’s forthcoming mayoral election, on Friday evening promised that if he is elected, he will endeavour to close the United Nations peacekeepers’ camp which is located in the town.

“The United Nations camp no longer has a place in Famagusta. I will demonstrate the necessary resolve with the strength I will receive from you. I will fight alongside you to have this camp removed from there,” he told a rally in the town’s centre.

The camp is known as Camp General Stefanik, and is the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus (Unficyp)’s headquarters for its “sector 4”, which is manned by a total of 240 Slovak peacekeepers.

It has been in existence for a total of 110 years, having been first established as the Karaolos prisoner-of-war camp by the British in 1916 to house Ottoman troops captured by British forces during the Arab Revolt, the Gallipoli Campaign, and the Sinai and Palestine campaigns of the First World War

Later, it housed members of the White Army who fled Russia after losing the country’s civil war to the communists, before most famously being used as detention centres Jewish people who intended to settle in Palestine following the end of the Second World War.

Ozersay had requested camp’s closure in 2018

The prospect of the camp’s closure has been raised before, with Kudret Ozersay having raised the matter with the UN in 2018, when he was ‘foreign minister’ and incumbent Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman was ‘prime minister’.

In the October of that year, Ozersay had told the Turkish Cypriot Tak news agency that “the area can be transformed into a park with trees, where Famagusta can breathe, and be made available for public use”, before adding that “we now want the UN to leave the area”.

He said the Turkish Cypriot authorities had offered to help find Unficyp “alternative locations to which they could relocate their military camps”, but stressed that “at this time, having a military camp and such activities in the middle of the town is neither appropriate nor compatible with public safety”.

However, in the eight intervening years since then, the camp has remained unmoved.

Koral Bozkurt is a popular figure in Famagusta, being the chairman of the town’s most successful Turkish Cypriot football club, Magusa Turk Gucu. Alongside the UBP, he has also won the endorsement of the ruling coalition’s junior partner, the DP.

He will aim to unseat incumbent Suleyman Ulucay, who belongs to centre-left political party the CTP, on December 6.