This Europe: Refugee crosses minefields to reach her childhood home

The collapse of the Cyprus peace talks this month was too much for one woman living on the Greek side of the buffer zone that splits the island.

The 40-year-old, whom the authorities refused to identify, walked across a minefield near Nicosia, in the zone patrolled by the United Nations, and crossed to the Turkish side. She told an astonished Turkish-Cypriot patrol that she was going home to the village of Petra tou Digeni, which she had not seen for 29 years.

As many as 200,000 Cypriots were displaced by the Turkish invasion in 1974, which came in response to a Greek-engineered coup on the island. For these refugees, mainly ethnic Greeks who fled the occupation in the north, the death of the UN reunification plan was final confirmation that they would never return home.

The woman, found drunk and in tears, according to the Turkish-Cypriot newspaper Yeni Duzen, was lucky to be alive after crossing the mile-wide zone, which contains at least 70 minefields and 30,000 landmines.

The "green line" winds for 112 miles across the island, cutting Nicosia in two, in an echo of Cold War Berlin.Despite years of international mediation and a number of UN Security Council resolutions not a single refugee has been allowed to return home. The prospect of an end to Europe's longest-running conflict is as distant as ever.