accidents like these are not all together uncommon in
the mountainous lands between Armenia and Azerbaijan
that between 1991-94 had gone through a bloody four
year war of independence which claimed the lives of
30,000 people.
According to Halo Trust Organization, which is
handling the clean-up of the landmines and other
unexploded military devices, only about 20% of known
sites have been cleared. Meanwhile accidents are still
taking place and to the average of about 15 a year.
�It will be another five to seven years until we are
done here,� predicts program manager Ed Rowe.
ceasefire between the two sides yet still last peace has not yet been found.
In the capital Stepanakert, which had been decimated from a Sarajevo style siege during the war, the city
has been re-built. The signs of war have all been patched up and gone from view yet people here are
still uneasy about the unresolved conflict and fear a return to the what they call - �the dark times�.
�A generation has grown up since the bombing� says school teacher Lusine Bakhshiyan who was a child at
the start of the war when the family moved into the basement of their apartment building but remembers the
constant bombing and fear to leave the basement for fear of 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�
roads between settlements pass ghost towns and ruined factories that no one is interested in re-building
when a resurgence of war is still a concern.
A group of teachers outside the Monte Melkonian Kindergarten, named after the California born hero who
rushed into Mountainous-Karabakh at the outbreak of war like so many other young men and women of
Armenia�s vast diasporas, speak about their frustration in the staled peace talks and how little their situation has improved since the war ended.
about the deadlocked peace talks - �It is stupid to say the talks have reached a deadlock. We are carrying
on professional discussions and are ready to continue them.�
But talk is cheep for people like Artavard Petrosyan who lost a son to the war and is himself crippled by
shrapnel. His home lies so close to the military zone that he says he can hear the exchange of sniper fire
that still carries in disregard of the ceasefire agreement.
He recollects that it was just a year ago that an attack on a boarder post killed soldiers on both sides.
Meanwhile newspapers in Stepanakert have been reporting that the Azerbaijan leadership has been
�loosing patience� with the decade old peace talks that seem to be going nowhere. Azerbaijan wants its
lands returned while Mountainous-Karabakh has no intentions of returning it and this is made clear on
the stamp of Karabakh Foreign Affairs office - �PERMANENT REPRESENTATION OF REPUBLIC OF MOUNTAINOUS- KARABAKH�
given back,� says a women outside the Mandakert War Memorial where the walls are covered in a mosaic of
over 600 young faces from the area who died during the bloody four year war.
Many here believe that the U.S. is the only power capable of jump starting the stalled peace talks, but
according to Armenian-American lobbyist groups the Bush Administration has sidelined the conflict in its
quest for Islamic allies for its war on terror.
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 Armenia.
But Ed Rowe of Halo Trust says he doesn�t care about the politics and his only wish is that Azerbaijan would talk with him about the location of Azeri land mind fields which are usually being found after another �accident�.
because more people are coming back and returning to the lands and plowing further and further which is a
great thing but many are overlooking some of our signs thinking they know better and then they have an
accident�
In the town of Mardakert where people still live in homes without doors and water flows just a few hours
every week - they claim they are aware of the dangers.