As an unhappy 17-year-old Nese Yasin lay in her bed and wrote a poem in her notebook: "Love your country, says my father. But my country is divided. Which half does he want me to love?"

She didn't think the poem was anything special at the time, but then it was published in a renowned magazine. Mario Tokas, a musician from the Greek part of Cyprus, wrote a tune to it, and the song become famous all over the island after being played in cafés and on the radio, in both the Turkish north and in the Greek south. Perhaps the song expresses the only thing that still unites Cyprus after 32 years of division -- a vague feeling of loss. Nese Yasin is 47 today, and she's become one of the country's most well-known writers. She's been giving a lot of interviews in her apartment in the southern part of the capital Nicosia lately, since she is the first Turkish Cypriot to run for parliament in the Greek south.

The elections will be held on Sunday. Yasin is running for a small left-wing party, the United Democrats, which currently only has one MP. She's not expecting to make it into parliament. "But if I do get elected, it would be a revolutionary development for Cyprus," she says.

Yasin's candidature is mainly symbolic. But symbolism is important in a country in which very little has happened on the level of practical politics for the last two years.

All hopes that Cyprus could finally solve its problems were disappointed on April 24, 2004, when 76 percent of Greek Cypriots rejected the settlement plan proposed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The settlement plan would have turned the two parts of the island into largely autonomous members of a federation. A clear majority of Turkish Cypriots -- 65 percent -- voted in favor of the settlement plan. It was just another example of how divided the country remains.

Turkish republic recognized only by Turkey

On May 1 of the same year, Cyprus joined the EU -- as a single nation, officially. But the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" is recognized only by Turkey itself, so that the Greek part of Cyprus is the only de facto EU member.

The Greek Cypriots on the southern part of the island have been demanding new negotiations with the Turkish north, which insists on the implementation of the settlement plan developed by Annan.

That's left the EU with an anachronistic territorial conflict on its hands -- one it would like to simply forget. The region where the conflict is playing out is so far east it doesn't even appear on the map of Europe that features on euro notes. It's an absurd situation: Turkey, which is itself aspiring to enter the EU, refuses to recognize an official EU member state and denies ships and airplanes from Cyprus access to its ports. Meanwhile the Republic of Cyprus is threatening to use its veto power to sabotage Turkey's entry into the EU. It all makes the question of Cyprus increasingly hard to ignore for officials in Brussels.

The election in the southern part of the island isn't likely to change this situation. The term of 72-year-old President Tassos Papadopoulos continues until 2008, and with approval ratings of 60 percent he remains as popular as ever. Polls predict a clear majority for his checkered coalition, which consists of former communists, social democrats and Papadopoulos's own center-right party.

Prior to the April 2004 referendum, Papadopoulos presented the rejection of Annan's settlement plan as a patriotic duty. He pointed out that under the settlement plan Turkey would continue to be allowed to station troops in the north of the island, that tens of thousands of Turkish settlers would remain in the country and that property once owned by Greeks would not be returned to them. The president declared all supporters of the settlement plan traitors and promised a "better" plan.

Politicians not offering solutions

But none of the parties competing in the elections has a solution to offer. President Papadopoulos just keeps repeating that the peace process will be dead if negotiations are taken up too quickly and then fail. What alternative solution he has in mind is anyone's guess. Speaking to a French magazine two weeks ago, he even questioned what little consensus there has been so far by calling not for a federation but for a single unified state. Voices of protest soon forced him to backtrack. A speaker said Papadopoulos had been "misunderstood."

In both parts of the island, political decisions are still being taken by those who have spent decades fighting each other. Papadopoulos himself was long a member of Eoka, the feared Greek underground army which fought both British colonial forces and Turkish Cypriots. Each side glorifies its own fighters and attributes crimes to the other. Negotiations are treated as a zero sum game; no one wants to compromise.

The results of this stubbornness can be seen in the center of Nicosia. Ledra Street, a popular shopping area in the Greek south, ends abruptly with a wall guarded by a bored-looking soldier. Tourists and school classes stand around the UN Buffer Zone that has separated the two parts of the island since 1964. Ledra Street actually continues inside the Buffer Zone -- a stretch of shot-up, overgrown buildings that have been deserted for more than 40 years. A white metal bridge leads into the Turkish part of Cyprus on the other side. The bridge is closed.

There were plans for establishing a border crossing between northern and southern Cyprus here, but the Greeks have protested against the fact that the Turks built their bridge without any prior negotiations, with the border control facilities located inside the Buffer Zone.

Opening a closed border

The Turks refuse to tear down the bridge. They've put up a banner instead, which reads: "To those looking from the Wall of Shame -- This is the Bridge of Peace." The border crossing remains closed.

Despite the daily propaganda war, there has been some traffic between the northern and the southern part of the island since Cyprus joined the EU. Roughly 7,000 commuters flock to the wealthy Greek part of the island every day, most of them construction workers. And Greek Cypriots go to the north of the island in order to shop cheaply. The Turkish part of Cyprus, which was long isolated economically, is now experiencing an economic boom; while it remains low, GNP has risen by 30 percent in two years. The real estate market is doing especially well, with Turkish investors building giant hotel complexes. The EU has decided to offer €139 million ($178 million) in financial support to northern Cyprus -- a decision that speaks volumes about the EU's helplessness vis-à-vis its divided member state.

The real problem in Cyprus is the political class, says Nese Yasin: "The politicians are not interested in solving the problem. They make a living off it."

She's fought for a settlement all her life. She's worked for political groups promoting a settlement and she used to travel from the north to the south on illegal smuggling routes, until she finally opted for moving to the south permanently nine years ago. She did it to send a political message, she says -- to prove that Turkish Cypriots don't have to live in the north.

Yasin wants to preserve the memory of those days when Turkish and Greek Cypriots lived peacefully side by side -- as they did in her hometown of Peristerona, which she and her family had to flee in 1963.