More from Cyprus

The Turkish Prime Minister is scheduled to visit Cyprus tomorrow, and his country's attitude towards the longstanding stalemate in the island will be crucial to any solution. Here is an opinion piece by Martin Woollacott in today's The Guardian: "Free movement may still heal the division of Cyprus." Woollacott describes some of the cordial, if somewhat wary, encounters between Greek and Turkish Cypriots separated from each other for more than a generation:

A touching politeness has marked some of these encounters. Greek Cypriots call out greetings to Turks as they drive through southern villages. A Turkish Cypriot dentist leaves a message on the front door that if any members of the Greek family who had once lived in the house should visit during working hours they are to come to his surgery to get the key. There are people on the Greek side who cannot bring themselves to show their passports to a Turkish Cypriot official or sign a register because, as one said: "I should be free to go anywhere in my own island."

But it seems that one of the obstacles to a genuine settlement is the turbulence in current politics in Turkey itself, the secular character of whose government is guaranteed by the military. Prime Minister Erdogan's AKP, or Justice and Development Party, is more islamic in orientation. To be sure, it is a democratically elected government, but in a country where the military is the guardian of the constitution, there are continuing tensions between the armed forces and the civilian authorities. This is complicating matters with respect to a number of issues, of which Cyprus is only one.

In Cyprus itself meanwhile, the peaceful popular uprising continues, fuelled by dreams of return to the places of the past, where distance is measured not so much in miles as in memories--memories of nearly three decades separating people from their villages, which lie just on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Woollacott puts it in this way:

Yet there are people in Cyprus who have dreamed almost every night for years of the village or neighbourhood they left long ago. They remember, as the anthropologist Peter Loizos has recorded, loading their furniture on carts at night "as if we were thieving from out of our own houses", or, in other cases, leaving "as if we were going out for a stroll". Now, in the shape of visits to the loved places, at last some balm has been spread on the wounds .... That must surely work through in time, even if the phenomenon of popular reconciliation visible today in Cyprus does not have an immediate or dramatic effect on the prospects for a settlement.