The My Heart Is In the Highlands initiative organised a gathering on Monday in front of a COP17 venue demanding the closure of the Amulsar gold mine and a new environmental impact assessment. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced the opening of the gold mine one week before the biodiversity conference in Yerevan.
The Amulsar gold mine is located in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor province, near the resort town of Jermuk. Construction of the gold mine began in 2016 but has been halted since June 2018 due to local protesters blocking access to the project. The blockade ended during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. Environmental activists have expressed concerns that the mining process and the use of cyanide to extract gold could affect the Arpa and Vorotan rivers, and even Lake Sevan — Armenia’s largest freshwater reserve.
OC MediaArtur Grigoryan
The Amulsar gold mine is operated by the Lydian Armenia company, a subsidiary of Lydian International, registered in the British tax haven of Jersey. They argue that they are introducing the best international practices in health and safety, environmental management, and social responsibility. They cite the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) for the Amulsar mine that they conducted in accordance with international standards back in 2016.
Following the 2018 Velvet Revolution in Armenia, the issue gained prominence again. While there was a lack of public trust in the assessment ordered by Lydian Armenia, Pashinyan’s government ordered a $450,000 assessment of the mine from Earth Link & Advanced Resources Development (ELARD). In 2024, the government greenlit the mine.
The protesters gathered near the entrance to the COP17 Green Zone, one of the conference’s venues, at the Karen Demirchyan Music and Sport Complex in Yerevan. However, police officers asked them to move down to the stairs of the building if they wanted to hold posters, since they did not have a formal permit.
A member of the My Heart Is In The Highlands initiative, Karine Panosyan, told OC Media that they planned to gather in front of the Green Zone, which is a COP17 venue open to the public and then intended to move on to the Blue Zone, which is the official, restricted negotiation area for UN member delegations..
‘The police did not let us take our posters and walk from the Green Zone to the Blue Zone, saying it was for safety reasons. But that is very funny because we were all very safe and calm. We were not going to cause any danger or anything else. They forbid us to organise our protest here with our posters and to say what we want to say to the world about the ecological problem in Armenia’, said Panosyan.
She added that they did not apply to get a permit because the law does not oblige them to do so for gatherings under 100 people.
On 10 October, Pashinyan, accompanied by government officials and party members, opened the mine. In his speech, he described the event as a ‘success story’, describing the process leading to it as practice the government should adopt in other investment projects.
‘We have to talk about why we can organise this event in such a ceremonial environment without protest or similar actions nearby’, Pashinyan said.
He said that the government tried to address public concerns in the past years by raising awareness and showing Armenians that the project was theirs and not something from outside. Lydian Armenia holds a 75.5% share in the mine, while the Armenian government holds 12.5%.
Levon Galstyan, a geographer who has been with the Amulsar movement since the beginning, was also attending the protest. He thinks that the reason the mine opened now is that they could not find funding from their international partners, due to environmental concerns and the results of the assessment.
‘Every government in Armenia has been in favour of opening any mine in Armenia, including this one. They [Lydian Armenia] were not restarting after 2020 because there were financial issues and no one wanted to finance the project. The government wanted it so much that they did something unique: they guaranteed a $180 million budget for the mine, enabling the company to take out a loan of that amount from the bank. If problems emerge and the company cannot repay the loan, the state has to pay that money from the budget’, he said.
Lydian Armenia announced that it received around a $150 million loan from Armenian America Bank under a state guarantee by the Armenian government for the project.
Andrei Ralev, representing the Central and Eastern European Bankwatch network, which monitors public money and the financing of projects by large European banks in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, claims that there is a risk of cyanide spilling from the mine, which could pollute the Arpa River, or of acid drainage, which could pollute the water that goes to Lake Sevan.
‘The Amulsar gold mine has been one of the worst environmental problems for Armenia for more than ten years. There are several issues related to biodiversity. Armenia should follow the rules of international conventions, and it is ignoring them very much’, he told OC Media.
Ralev was also part of a discussion during COP17, where he spoke about the Bern Convention’s position on mining at Amulsar.
‘One of the most important issues is that the Jermuk community was not consulted. There are already impacts on local communities and tourism, which has been developed in the Jermuk spa town’, he added.