"Fact" daily writes:
Even years ago, the activities of Armenian environmental organizations could be treated as an ideological struggle for the protection of the country's environment.
In some cases it was indeed so. However, the developments of recent years have shown that, as much as the problem of environmental protection and improvement exists, a significant part of Armenian environmental organizations was not focused on identifying real problems, but on solving the issue of defeating specific target programs and sectors.
Judge for yourself: from tree cutting in Yerevan to burning landfills, from transport emissions to uncontrolled construction with emissions of cement and other toxic substances, they have a direct and very clear impact on the health of the population.
But the target of environmentalists continues to be the pillar of Armenia's economy, the mining sector.
And this is surprisingly consistent with Azerbaijan's aggressive and very clearly imagined attacks on Armenia's economy, especially after the 44-day war. During the past year, large-scale media campaigns against Armenian mining companies Kajaran, Sotk, Amulsar were organized in the Azerbaijani press, the "culmination" of which was COP29. presenting Armenia as an "enemy" of nature and environment.
Much has been written about this. For this campaign unleashed against Armenia, Azerbaijan mainly used the statements made by Armenian environmentalists over the years, often fictitious.
Armenian environmentalists often perceive references to this with pain: why do you accuse us of helping Azerbaijan?
However, all this cannot be ignored, if we take into account that a number of Armenian NGOs continue to contribute to the espionage-like activities of dubious "international" organizations in Armenia even after all this.
Thus, in particular, the "Arnica" organization of Czech origin continues to directly or indirectly supply Azerbaijan with supposedly "scientific" data about the mining sector of Armenia.
From the January 7 publication of the "Ecolur" NGO website, it becomes known that the grant program given by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the detection of industrial pollution in other countries has most likely reached the Syunik region as well.
Of course, still in 2023. after the noise about that organization in December, the name of that organization is not mentioned in this article, but the official logos of "Arnica" and the grant program of the Czech MFA are present at the beginning of the article.
Ever since 2018, the experts of the Czech NGO, together with the "Community Integration and Support Center" and "EcoLur" NGOs, have been taking samples of biological substances of water and soil of Armenia for years in a number of marzes (Ararat, Lori, Kotayk and Aragatsotn), studying are the distribution channels of heavy metals in the mines and tailings there.
In fact, in Armenia they continue to advertise that Czech NGO, "celebrating" their claims that Armenia pollutes the region.
No one has checked the data of this Czech organization, but they are actively quoted in the Azerbaijani press.
Let us remind that this Czech organization, with the support of Armenian NGOs, as can be understood from various publications, visited Armenia in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.
And it was very interesting that in the same Azerbaijan, as well as in Turkey, they never dealt with cases of industrial pollution.
However, this circumstance does not seem to be an alarm for Armenian environmental NGOs, and they continue to cooperate with a suspicious foreign organization.
The question arises: why is a suspicious Czech organization engaged in "revealing the problem", whose activities have been widely covered on Azerbaijani websites?
Whether this is a coincidence or not, the publication of the above-mentioned article coincided with the publication of the militant interview of the President of Azerbaijan, where the so-called "Zangezur Corridor" was mentioned again, which is directly related to the Syunik region. All this, of course, is already a matter of national security, which, we hope, is still being dealt with in Armenia...
