1. The "unclaimed territory" story is a blatant lie.
2. The land in question (Gornja Siga) is a floodplain. It gets completely flooded with water multiple meters deep every couple of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland
EDIT:
> Define "scam"? Who is trying to scam who in this situation?
Jedlička sold quite a few Liberland "citizenships".
But there's no dispute that either Serbia or Croatia owns it, and it doesn't really matter, as to any third party attempt to set up a state in defiance of the status quo administration, whether Croatia is conducting non-hostile administration of Serbian territory with Serbian consent or administering its own territory.
If there's a smudge in the only copy of a contract you can find and you think it called for a 60/40 split of profits from a certain kind of joint activity in your partner’s favor, and they think it called for a 60/40 split in your favor, there's 20% that is uncertain until some reolution is reached, but that doesn’t mean that someone else can just restructure the deal unilaterally to be 40/40/20, which is (but for the actual numbers and the nonfungible nature of land) what Liberland is trying to do.
The Liberlanders' claim that the patch was terra nullius was silly from day one. An area is terra nullius if there is no recognized government hoping to run it, not if there is no recognized government that will publicly commit to keep running it forever.
The Liberlanders' new claim that the patch is bona vacantia is just completely batshit gaga. Bona vacantia is about private ownership title rather than sovereignty, does not exist in civil law jurisdictions, and when successfully invoked just means ownership of the item in question has reverted to the Crown.
We need a moratorium on ancaps having legal opinions until their semantics games become functionally distinguishable from SovCit woo.
So it seems clear that (1) its either non-ceded Croatian territory being administered by Croatia with a diplomatic choice not to make an affirmative claim without arbitration of the border, or (2) it's by prior treaty Serbian territory, which may or may have been ceded to Croatia, which is being administered by Croatia without challenge to any rights Serbia (and only Serbia) may have.
Furthermore international law differs from normal law as usually at least one party has tanks.
So, neither side claims it, because they both claim a better area. But whoever ends up losing the better area is going to take it.
Edit: Replying to people by editing your own post is bad form. It makes the conversation very hard to follow.
I fail to see how a Liberland citizenship is any more scammy than any of the other supremely silly things people decide to spend their money on. I'd like to see concrete evidence that people buying a Liberland citizenship thought they were paying for something real.
It looks like a fun project, but I wouldn't consider it evidence that anyone there was fooled by the founder into thinking they could actually live there permanently.
So who claims it?
People are trying to play this off as if Croatia doesn’t “want” the territory, but that’s not really it at all. They don’t want to lose a larger dispute. They’re happy to have the land.
So: yes, this is approximately “building on Yellowstone” levels of silly.
It deserves to be noted that even people who camp in city parks do have some supporters. That said, people who have the resources to build a solid home with amenities, including electricity and satellite network access, and keep a website running to tell their one-sided story, are not comparable to homeless campers.
This is why a key precondition of being a state is recognition and border agreements with your neighbours - without that, the hypothetical state literally has no rights, not even the right to exist.
That doesn't mean either side will accept some third party adding another algorithm and set of borders into the mix.
Ah, so that was the catch. I have to wonder, what do the libertarians do when their entire nation is meters deep in water? Apply for asylum at the Croatian border?
Or did it just not happen so far?
They pull themselves up by their bootstraps!