In May 2004, ten years after the end of military operations in Nagorno Karabakh, eleven-year-old Albert Arustamyan had found a small metallic ball near the village of Gishi, and he and his sister Tsovik Arustamyan were playing with it in the outskirts of the village. Neither of them remembered the war - Tsovik was born in 1995 and Albert was just one year old when the war ended. Tsovik got scared, and told Albert to throw the strange toy away. But when he did, it hit a rock, and being a bomb, exploded, killing the eleven year old on the spot, and seriously wounding his little sister.

Is there anything you can say to console a father who loses a son ten years after the war? The war that he fought and won? When I spoke to Ashot Arustamyan, I couldn't think of anything.

Fortunately for Tsovik, passers-by took her to the Military Hospital in Martuni, where a Dr. Gasparyan performed emergency surgery. She woke up after a five-day coma. Her relatives only agreed to speak with me if I promised to express their gratitude, through the press, to all those who helped Tsovik - the head of the Martuni Hospital, Dr. Stepanyan, Dr. Gasparyan, the entire hospital staff, and the villagers who took the bleeding, unconscious child to the hospital. They are also grateful to Roger Ohanesian (a doctor from California) who with Alexander Malayan operated on the girl's eyes at the Yerevan Eye Surgery Center.

Almost every family in Karabakh lost loved ones during the war. People got used to it, became reconciled to the idea that they would live with this sorrow for the rest of their lives. But the war keeps on giving them bloody gifts. When the Azerbaijani planes were bombarding peaceful towns and villages with cassette bombs, few people knew that those bombs, banned as unconventional arms by international treaties, would find their victims ten years later. These weapons contained hundreds of little bombs the size of tennis balls, which are scattered around populated areas to this day. The malicious irony of it is that if children find them, they can't resist playing with them. What kind of a mind could create a weapon like that? Maybe it was the work of a whole group of scientists; maybe they won the state prize for it. Who knows?