NAGORNO- KARABAKH�
�Land mines and sniper fire� says a woman in black mopping the floor and without even looking up from her work.
Today, after a decade of not finding peace the violence goes on in the form of sniper fire along the boarders and land mine accidents.
The conflict began back in 1991 while George Bush senior was in office. As the Soviet Union began to crumble the Christian people of Karabakh declared independence from the Islamic, Turkic nation of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan authority over Karabakh goes back to Stalin�s controversial decision back in the 1920�s that was put in place as a means of dividing Armenia and diminishing its influence in the area.
At that time, the Azerbaijan government, which had just successfully freed itself from Moscow control, didn�t quite see the people of Karabakh�s overwhelming vote of independence as legitimate as their own war of independence from the Soviet Union and responded with a Sarajevo style siege over the capital.
School teacher Lusine Bakhshiyan, who was just a child at the start of the war when the family moved into the basement of their apartment still vividly remembers the constant bombing and being prohibited from leaving the building due to sniper fire. �We used to try and make a game out of it by counting between bombs blasts and trying to guess where they landed�
Today the United States strong influence in the area is seen as the last hope in jump starting the stalled peace talks before the violence escalates and the area returns to the days referred to here as �the dark times�. Since 2001, however, the Bush administration has been criticized for sidelined the conflict in its quest for Islamic allies on its war on terror.
�The US, which was always in a hurry to settle the conflict has become slow and closer to Russia�s position which is in no hurry at all,� claims the Armenian newspaper Ayots Ashkar which compares the US position of keeping the status-quo to that of Russia which faces its own terrorist conflicts in the area with Chechnya. �it gives the superpowers the chance to kick the conflict into the tall grass.�
It has also been suggested that the large US contracts on the new Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline has further quelled the White House on pressuring Azerbaijan and Turkey to lift its crippling blockade over both Karabakh and Armenia.
Meanwhile the conflict continues to fester.
Villager Artavard Petrosyan who lost a son to the war and is himself crippled by shrapnel says he hears the tough talk coming out of Baku through his television which picks up the Azerbaijan channels
His home lies so close to the military zone that he hears the sniper fire that still carries on from both sides of the boarder. Twice last year the speratic sniper fire escalated into attacks on boarder posts and which killed soldiers on both sides.
For the roughly 200,000 Christian Armenians that inhabit the sliver of land sandwiched between Azerbaijan and Armenia conflict has been a part of life all the way back to the days when they stood between pagan Rome and Zoroastrian Persia.
�You can not separate Christian identity from Armenian identity,� says Armenian Apostolic priest Fr. Armen Devejian of the 3000 year old peoples who�s conversion to Christianity began with the apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus and which led to the church�s name Apostolic.
The Catholic community in Armenia is centered in the northern part of the country around the city Gyumri where they are still picking up after a disastrous 1988 earthquake that killed nearly 50,000 people and devastated the region. Today the city�s 15,000 Catholics are still without a church.