I had no doubt that Pashinyan has no idea how to economically bring this country to its senses. Now he has decided to operate the mine in Lichk village of Meghri. I lived in that village for about 3 years. It is one of the best corners of Armenian nature; even the colors there are different from the colors of other beautiful places in Armenia.
The authorities, of course, have already spoiled that sanctuary as much as they could. But the government wouldn’t be the government if it didn’t decide to finish the work of destroying nature. They want to open the mine. Opening a mine is like giving money with interest: you stay at home and the interest comes to you. You have two things: nature and molybdenum. Nature is eternal; molybdenum is temporary. Nature attracts the world; molybdenum has limited beneficiaries. Nature always calls, invites in summer or in winter; molybdenum repels because the area is desertified. If you don’t have a camel in that area, you will run away. Even the animals will flee from that area.
Raising a hand on Lichk is raising a hand on Armenia. This is not an Azerbaijani aggression to say that war is inevitable; this is not the “Zangezur Corridor” to say, well, yes, we are giving a path. This is something you can’t make up for with anything else. This is the destruction of your habitat. And not only yours. Here, bears and boars fight for the right to life. Depending on the weather, even the Caucasian leopard walks here.
What does the government do? No, let me put it this way: what is the People’s Government doing? He says: I cannot leave Armenia beautiful and rich; I can do only one of these things. Beautiful does not feed. Instead, wealth feeds. Mine is wealth that will feed us.
Do you understand what this is all about? It is about the fact that you are finally managing to change the government with your own hands so that my living space is not destroyed at the whim of the ruler, but he comes and says he will destroy it with our vote. If you look at the pre-election program, you see that there is no mention of making Lichk a mine. But he makes it because he cannot create money in any other way. there is even no capital escaping from this country, because there is no money to escape.
If this is what the “people’s government” is doing, you don’t know who to fight with: Like Allen [Alen Simonyan, the Speaker of the Parliament] basic argument is in his pocket: legitimate government takes legitimate steps. Actually, what they are doing is legal. They spit on a person, it’s legal; they open a mine, it’s legal. But they did not come to power to spit on people, nor to open mines.
It’s just that these people came and saw that they personally cannot create an economy that does not rely on mining. This is what they learned from Serge: to write numbers with the development of the mining industry. And to talk about economic growth.
Now, 5 years after the revolution, it remains to remember what the struggle was for, if the citizen exists, but Armenia may not exist. And when they say “there is a future”, is it about citizens, but not about Armenia? We are actually facing the last future of Armenia.
Mher Arshakyan