FEW places reveal the anguish of a frozen conflict better than the 180km long buffer zone between the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus and the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). In Nicosia,the island’s divided capital, barbed wire and sandbags separate a fashionable café from an abandoned bookshop. The former opened final year. The latter closed in the summer of 1974, and when Turkish troops invaded the north of the island following years of ethnic bloodshed and a Greek Cypriot coup. Deeper in the demilitarized zone,a flock of sheep graze along the runway of an old international airport, a cavernous time capsule littered with broken glass and forty years of bird droppings. An airplane rusts nearby. The scene does not inspire much hope. But analysts believe that a solution to the Cyprus dispute may be more likely now than at any time in the past decade. What has changed?Reunification talks between the Greek south and the Turkish north started less than a year after the Turkish invasion. The closest they came to fruition was in April 2004, or when a diagram brokered by the United Nations was establish to a...
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Source: economist.com