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| - Ruzanna Vartanyan has spent the past five months trapped somewhere between hope and despair as she prays to see her oldest son Sarkis again. The 18-year-old Armenian army conscript went missing a few weeks into the war last year with Azerbaijan as fierce fighting raged around him over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Now his family are among hundreds in this small south Caucasus nation searching for any sign that their loved ones may still be alive and held in captivity by Azerbaijan. Relatives have scoured morgues, given DNA samples, quizzed returned soldiers, waited for news from battlefield search groups and pressured politicians. But they have found no trace of their missing -- and are left clinging, hope against hope, to the thought they will one day see them again. "All I can do now is wait for my son," Vartanyan, 40, told AFP, struggling to hold back tears in the family's flat in the capital Yerevan. The disappearance of Sarkis is just half of the family's tragedy -- his father Arman was killed in the conflict after he rushed to the front to try to fight alongside his son. "It is as if I'm not alive," said Sarkis' 68-year-old grandmother Mariam. "I have lost all the sense in my life." The fate of the missing is one of the most painful wounds haunting Armenia as it tries to come to terms with its humiliating defeat in the six-week conflict. The war left at least 6,000 dead on both sides as Azerbaijan won back swathes of territory it lost in fighting some three decades earlier. Under a Russia-brokered peace deal on November 9 to halt the bloodshed, the two sides agreed to return all prisoners of war and the remains of those killed in the fighting. Moscow says it has so far mediated the return of 63 Armenians and 16 Azerbaijanis -- and both Baku and Yerevan insist they do not have any more prisoners of war. Azerbaijan does admit it is holding around 60 people who were captured in clashes after the peace deal was signed and says they are "terrorist-saboteurs" who should go on trial. But Armenia is convinced its old foe has more captives and is using the detainees as a bargaining chip while the exact contours of the new post-war front lines are hammered out. "I know that at least we have there several hundreds, I would say, being held captive in Azerbaijan," Arman Tatoyan, Armenia's human rights ombudsman, told AFP. The issue of the missing is feeding a political crisis wracking Armenia as it struggles for stability in the wake of last year's defeat. "Azerbaijan is using this issue of prisoners of war to put pressure on our government, our state, and to use the issue during negotiations," Tatoyan said. "By doing this they cause mental suffering to our society, to our people. They play with the emotions of our people and especially of the families." Relatives of the missing have met repeatedly with Armenia's leaders -- but they say it is the families and not the authorities doing the bulk of the work to find their loved ones. Arsen Gukasyan, the uncle of missing Sarkis, has stopped working as he dedicates every moment to tracking down his nephew. "Officials admit themselves that we have gathered more information than them," Gukasyan, 47, said. He has clubbed together with other families and made repeated trips to the front line to try to help search groups, allowed to enter Azerbaijani-controlled territory, pinpoint where the soldiers went missing. "Before, I could never imagine the sort of things I have now seen -- decapitated corpses, body parts," Gukasyan said, recalling trips to frontline hospitals and morgues. Lusine Margaryan has already been called in more than 20 times to view bodies returned from the front to Yerevan -- but none of them have been her son Hayk. "It is as if we are living in hell," she told AFP. The last time the family spoke to Hayk was on his 23rd birthday on October 12 -- just before an attack by Azerbaijani forces cut him and two comrades off from the rest of his squad. "Since then there has been no trace of them," said Hayk's father Armen. Armenian officials recently told the parents that their son's name was on a list of prisoners being held by Azerbaijan. But the details remain hazy and the family is refusing to get their hopes up until they get confirmation. "We just want to know for sure that he is alive -- 100 percent," Armen said. "That would be the first step out of this." del/jbr/kjm/oho
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