Save Amulsar: The Forgotten Campaign

A friend sends Hovik a photo of a Save Amulsar graffiti still painted on a Yerevan street and asks what it means. His reply is the hook: that was from eight years ago, when the so-called Velvet Revolution, which critics see as a regime change operation, wanted to present itself as environmentally friendly. The campaign against the Amulsar gold mine was, he says, a pet project of Lena Nazaryan, a top Civil Contract figure. The message then was that mining Amulsar would harm the environment and the people of the region.

The payoff is the contradiction. Eight years later, the operation is not only proceeding but is now, in the hosts’ account, enriching figures connected to the government, which is why it is allowed to continue. The same movement that mobilized around saving Amulsar has gone silent on it. The graffiti becomes a small monument to an abandoned cause, a piece of a political program used when convenient and dropped once the incentives changed.

For an audience following Armenian news, corruption, and the economy under Civil Contract, the moment crystallizes a recurring theme: environmental slogans deployed for political mobilization, then reversed in office. It connects to the episode’s wider thread on government stakes in major enterprises and the hosting of a biodiversity conference by a government the hosts accuse of environmental double standards. A single fading wall becomes shorthand for a broken promise, the kind of concrete, visual detail that carries well in a short clip.