In a bleakly efficient-looking laboratory at the United Nations compound in Nicosia, a team of forensic scientists is helping to lay the ghosts of Cyprus’s five-decade-old conflict to rest. Their work on the divided Mediterranean island, identifying the victims of a war that at various times has involved Cypriots, Turks, Greeks, Britons and all manner of international peacemakers, takes place within the buffer zone that has split it in two since 1974.

Thirty-two years after the Turkish army invaded Cyprus to prevent the island’s unification with Greece, this initiative is today the only substantive one involving co-operation between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot authorities. Along with the array of human bones spread out on the lab tables, that is a stark reminder of how unfinished this conflict is.