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we need to do that. If it does not work peacefully, then we will get it back with the help of our army." Meanwhile, in the enclave itself, political leaders are in no mood to compromise with Azerbaijan. "Nagorno-Karabakh has been effectively independent for 10 years now and that status suits our people just fine," said Naira Melkumyan, Karabakh's foreign minister. This defiance notwithstanding, the decade-long state of war has done little for Karabakh's struggling economy. Recognized only by Yerevan, cut off from Azerbaijan by that country's economic blockade and still scarred by the fighting, Karabakh's economy is in a sorry state with unemployment high and industry stagnating. Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan admits that Karabakh depends on aid from Yerevan for its survival. "It is no secret that Armenia provides financial assistance to Nagorno-Karabakh," he said. "That will continue to be the case for as long as it is necessary." But it is still the human cost of the conflict -- the scattered families, the broken friendships -- that is most apparent in Karabakh and also in Armenia proper. On a street in the center of Yerevan, a woman told how she had to leave her Azeri husband behind in Baku. "I miss them," she said. "Our son Anatoly is grown up now, he's 18. He's studying in college. I miss the Caspian Sea so much." In the Idzhevan region of Armenia, near the border with Azerbaijan, one civil servant fondly remembered the time he spent in Baku as a student. "Many of my friends are Azeris," he said as he wiped nostalgic tears from his eyes. "We were friends, our families used to get together on holidays. "Who needs this conflict? Someone has made a load of money out of it while ordinary people are left to suffer." He said that he and many of his acquaintances, refugees from Azerbaijan, even now listen to recordings of Azeri music they brought with them when they fled their homes. "No one has thrown them out. We listen to them with the sound turned down so that our neighbors don't hear."

KHANKENDI, Nagorno-Karabakh -- While politicians in Armenia and Azerbaijan bicker over the status of this patch of land high in the remote reaches of the Caucasus mountains, the people caught in the middle are impatient for peace. When in the early 1990s ethnic hatred exploded in this region between Armenians and Azeris, Armenian nationalists took control of the Azeri-administered territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and fought a five-year war to keep it. It is here that the cost of the war, which still poisons relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan despite a 1994 cease-fire, is felt most keenly, AFP reported. Though they are afraid to say it in public, many of the present Karabakh population, and especially those who were resettled there when they were forced, as ethnic Armenians, to flee their homes in Azerbaijan, hanker after their old lives. A 24-year-old woman in the town of Khankendi, Karabakh's administrative center, wept as she remembered the home she had to leave behind in the Azeri capital Baku. "We miss Baku so much," said the woman, who asked not to be identified because she feared she would be fired for making pro-Azeri comments. "We miss the people, the city, the atmosphere there used to be. I have to say that, even if I lose my job." As she says this, her colleague, who has been listening to the conversation, whispers: "Say hello to Baku for me." "This war has done no good to anyone," said a 56-year-old from the Karabakh town of Lachin (Lachin is not part of Karabakh admininistration-Anayurdum). "All our lives we lived as brothers. We do not want any more bloodshed." Azeri President Heydar Aliyev and his Armenian counterpart Robert Kocharyan, at the urging of the international community, have been holding peace talks and for a while they appeared to be making progress. However, since April this year, the negotiations have stalled. Azeri officials have begun talking about a military solution to what they say is Armenia's illegal occupation of Karabakh. "We will definitely get (our land) back," Aliyev said recently. "We have everything