The citizens of Azerbaijan and Armenia are ready for inter-ethnic peace. The results of the opinion poll that was conducted in the two conflicting countries testify to this. The absolute majority of respondents on both sides, 95 per cent, said that they were for peace when answering the questions.

A press conference was held in Tbilisi to announce the results of the opinion poll that was conducted by the Millennium Association for Education and Research from Armenia and the Azerbaijani Sociological Association. It was said at the press conference that the opinion poll was conducted in the two countries for two months, and 2,400 respondents took part in the survey. In each country, 1,000 respondents from different towns participated. In addition, there were 200 Armenians who reside on the occupied territories in Karabakh and 200 Azeri internally displaced people from Karabakh among the respondents.

The project was funded by the US-based American University Centre for Global Peace. University of Texas Department of Sociology Professor Jeffrey Halley, representative of the university, noted that he was very surprised by the fact that the both sides of the conflict have so many things in common. "When asked whether the re-establishment of relations between the Azeris and the Armenians was desirable, 97 per cent of Armenian respondents and 93.2 per cent of Azerbaijani respondents replied in the affirmative," Halley said. Meanwhile, the representative of the American university pointed out the fact that 60 per cent of Armenians stipulate the so-called "independence" of Nagornyy Karabakh as the main condition for "peace". The release of the occupied territory was cited as a top condition for 38 per cent of the respondents from Azerbaijan, and 31.8 per cent deem the return of the refugees to their land the main condition as published; in actual report, 31.8 per cent of the respondents from the internally displaced persons' group listed the release of the occupied territory as the condition for re-establishing relations .

According to Sevil Asadova from the Azerbaijani Sociological Association, the sum of these two indicators (69.8 per cent) means that the Azeris support the idea of the liberation of the occupied Azerbaijani territories as published; the 69.8 per cent figure is not encountered in the survey .

"The survey showed that 23 per cent of the respondents blame the conflict on a third party, and 28.2 per cent - on the political elite of Armenia," Asadova said. President of the Millennium Rubina Ter-Martirosyan also confirmed that the majority of the respondents from Armenia blame the conflict on the "internal" forces, and only 14 per cent - on "external" ones. "In Armenia, 70.2 per cent of the population obtain information about Azerbaijan mainly from TV, which presents one-sided information. This situation has to be changed." figures in the preceding paragraph not present in the survey results According to her, the idea of the joint study was conceived in 2000, when she visited Baku and Sevil Asadova visited Yerevan under the framework of a conference on problems of women. The researchers were allocated 40,000 US dollars, which was split equally between the two countries. The organizers intend to translate their reports into Armenian and Azeri. Similar events will be held in Baku and Yerevan. The full version of the reports can be read at http:www.american.edu/cgp/mpaa/mpindex.html.