Changing system timezone in Debian

I tried many things but nothing had effect on the time seen by users, until I did this

# mv /etc/localtime  /etc/localtime.bak
# ln -s   /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/<YourCapital>  /etc/localtime

Previously I did

# tzselect
# ntpdate <countryID>.pool.ntp.org

and reboot, but still no joy.