Yerevanhas one official garbage dump, in Nubarashen. But in practice there are two. As senseless as it is, the Hrazdan Gorge has been used as a dump since Soviet times. Hakob Sanasaryan, Chairman of the Union of Greens of Armenia, is not exaggerating when he says that if Hrazdan Gorge were in any civilized country in the world it would be a protected area. The Gorge deserves that, both in terms of its archeological significance and in the plant and animal life that have not yet been completely destroyed. In the first two decades of the last century, there were apricot and walnut orchards, grapevines, and other valuable kinds of plants. Today we talk about this as a thing of the past, and we don’t rule out the possibility that in decades to come instead of “Hrazdan Gorge” we will say “the Canyon Dump”. If, of course people’s soulless and irresponsible attitude toward the gorge doesn’t change. It seems, at last, that theYerevanmayor’s office and local authorities have woken up to the alarming situation in the gorge. Almost a year ago, an intercommunity institution was created, the Hrazdan Gorge Closed Stock Company. Its founders are the councils of the Center, Arabkir and Ajapniak, Davtashen, and Arabkir Districts; The Mayor’s Office of Yerevan has a supervisory function.

The director of this company, Jirair Khachatryan, has difficulty saying approximately how much garbage there is in the gorge, but tells us that according to rough calculations by their specialists, it will take 45 million drams to remove it all.

“Most of the garbage (around 90%) is in the administrative territory of the Arabkir district,” Katchatryan says, “in what people call Korea Gorge, inMolakanGarden, and adjacent areas. There was also a perceptible amount of garbage in the Center district area, but only from March to April 14, 2002. At the initiative of the mayor’s office and the districts, we were able to remove 20 truckloads of garbage and a few truckloads of large fallen rock.” The company director assures us that he put twelve garbage cans there, and in addition, the businesses located in this area don’t allow anyone from outside to dump garbage. When we visited the area between the Haghtanak andKievyanBridges, we saw that although the amount of garbage there isn’t as negligible as Katchatryan says, it is true that it can’t be compared to the garbage piled up in the Korea Gorge, where there are still remnants from mercury lamps produced in the Soviet period. It is hard to say why the lamp factory dumped toxic garbage there in those days, but it is beyond a doubt that mercury, an extremely toxic substance, has, over the years, seeped into the earth. This area on the map ofArmeniais probably irreversibly lost and destroyed, since experts say that in nature, mercury is stable and doesn’t dissolve.

The pollution of the gorge is still going on today. But, the Hrazdan Gorge CSC has not, since it was created, registered or identified a single name or address of anyone who dumps garbage into the gorge. According to Khatchatryan, sporadic monitoring is not the solution, because they’ll stop bringing garbage for two days, and then start up again, and you can’t keep watch 24 hours a day. But there is no need for 24-hour monitoring. All that’s needed is to keep trucks out of the gorge.

About ten days ago, the Hrazdan Gorge CSC director sent Yerevan Mayor Robert Nazaryan the following report: “The recently-conducted monitoring of the Korea Gorge segment of the Hrazdan Gorge shows that the transportation and dumping of construction garbage and household garbage in this green belt is still going on. A number of these garbage trucks probably belong to the Arabkir District Department of Sanitation. Hrazdan Gorge CSC was planning to establish a checkpoint and gate on the road descending into the gorge, but it was discovered that this road has three or four entrances, and at present it is not possible for our company alone to control those entrances. In order to prevent the transportation of garbage into the Korea Gorge, we request that you order the Arabkir District Mayor and the City Department of the Ministry of the Interior to establish direct control over this area.

Considering past experience and similar situations, we are fairly confident that even if such an order is issued, in fact, no control will be established and the dumping of garbage will continue.

During a TV program broadcast more than a month ago the same Jirair Khatchatryan insisted that checkpoints would be set up in the gorge within a few days. He later explained that this promise was not fulfilled for financial reasons. Other districts are in no hurry to transfer money or to meet their obligations, and the 150,000 drams from the Ajapniak district alone isn’t enough to establish three or four checkpoints and gates, or to pay the salaries of the guards. From its establishment until the moment of our conversation, the company had received only 300,000 drams for the improvement and re-planting of the gorge. We found out that the company has no calculation of the amount necessary to open one checkpoint and gate. Khatchatryan told us that it’s not expensive to put in a gate, but to man it is beyond their budget. It takes around 350,000 drams to pay one guard for a year, and twice as much for two. But Khatchatryan himself informed us that by putting a gate across one road in the Arabkir area, it’s possible to close all three remaining access routes.

Does the mayor’s office have any projects, either ongoing or in the works, to remove the bulk of the garbage from the gorge? Unfortunately not. There has been only a directive by the prime minister that, according to Khatchatryan, mentions the issue of garbage. The mayor’s office held discussions on this directive. But in practice, no work has been done so far. When Hrazdan Gorge CSC was established, each of the district mayors promised its director that they would transfer from five to ten million drams in 2002. So far, no one has done so.