Institute for War & Peace Reporting
Jan 13 2005

ARMENIANS FEAR FOR THEIR RIVER

The pollution of the River Debed is causing manifold problems in
northern Armenia.

By Anush Sarkisian in Vanadzor

On rainy days the waters of the river flowing through the town of
Vanadzor are a jumble of murk and dirt. Even when the sun is shines,
the river looks dirty and its foamy waters throw plastic bottles and
other objects onto the bank.

The River Debed, one of Armenia’s longest rivers, runs through
northern Armenia into Georgia. Three of its tributaries flow through
Vanadzor, the third largest city in the country and one of its main
industrial centres. And many locals are worried that the pollution of
the Debed is threatening the future of their region.

“Seventy five per cent of Armenia’s water resources flow out of the
country,” Vartan Malakian, an environmental expert with the government
of the surrounding Lori region. “What’s happening to this river is a
catastrophe. The Debed is a mirror of the region and its economy, and

shows how much the people of Lori care about standards of industry and
everyday health.”

Malakian is also a member of the newly formed Public Committee for the
Debed River Basin, which is seeking to highlight the problems of the
river. Everything in the region revolves around the river he says,
pointing out, “The Debed has been the principal source of life for the
region for decades, providing water supply, irrigation, fish and
drinking water.”

Edik Ovsepian, the regional government press spokesman, warned that
the poor state of the river was hindering economic growth and
construction projects and discouraging tourism. He pointed out that
this was not a new problem but a legacy of Soviet heavy industry.

Yet Garnik Tumanian, 47, a construction worker from Vanadzor, said
things have been getting worse not better. “I grew up in the village
of Dsekh on the Debed,” he said. “All my childhood memories are
associated with fishing, picking blackberries and Cornel cherries in
the woods by the river. But in recent years, whenever I take my family
to the country, I wouldn’t let the kids go near the water.

“There is all sorts of pollution in it. Locals have always dumped
their rubbish [there], but recently a lot of new recreation spots and

restaurants have been built on the banks. Sometimes restaurateurs
build their toilets right on the river.”

Pollution from a number of factories is already having deleterious
health effects, says Karine Mirzoyan, head of the local hygiene and
epidemiology inspectorate. People who bathed in the rivers in summer
were suffering ill effects and in Alaverdi the ACP factory was
emitting dangerous levels of sulphur into the atmosphere, much of
which ended up in the river.

“This of course can be stimulate diseases of the respiratory tracts,”

said Mirzoyan. “To some extent this is why Alaverdi has the highest
rate of TB in the Lori region.”

A number of environmental organisations have been raising the alarm.
Two years ago, shoals of dead fish were spotted at the point where the
rivers Dzoraget and Pambak merge. There was no official explanation,
but environmentalists concluded that the fish had perished as a result
of the Vanadzor-based Prometei Khimprom chemicals factory dumping raw
waste into the river.

Prometei Khimprom was one of Armenia’s largest industrial complexes in
Soviet times and a prime polluter in the region, and its ownership

has changed hands many times since then.

“What actually happened was that the most recent owner, a Moscow-based
businessman named Senik Gevorgian, tried to start ammonia production
at the factory,” explained Artur Sakunts, a chemist and chairman of
the Vanadzor Helsinki Assembly human rights group. “Due to lack of
controls, the factory produced more ammonium than it could safely
store, while emitting poisonous gasses and dumping raw chemicals in
the river.”

Sakunts also said no privatisation agreements have ever mentioned the

pollution issue, so no one can be held responsible.

An employee of the factory who declined to be named denied that the
factory had dumped ammonium, while government spokesman Ovsepian said

he hoped the new owners of the factory would help finance the cleanup

of the river.

Rafik Kazinian, head of the Alaverdi Green Union and former parliament
deputy, is sceptical about these promises. He himself has personal
experience of the state of the Debed.

About ten years ago, Kazinian arranged for 15 truckloads of minnows to
be released into the Debed. “We had hope to revitalise the fish
population in seven to eight years, but instead the fish had all been

killed by poisonous emissions,” he said. “No fish can live in a river

that has been turned into a sewer.”

So far there has been only one initiative aimed at cleaning up the
river, a short-lived programme administered by the US company
Development Alternatives Inc. or DAI. The programme resulted in the
formation of the public council that now has the right to inspect
industrial facilities.

Local experts say the scale of the problem is much wider. “Can you
imagine a whole city without rubbish bins,” said Suren Eritsian,
managing director of Blagoustroistvo Alaverdi, the local waste
disposal company. “Where were the locals supposed to dispose of their
rubbish?

The river, of course. The problem is now being solved. A designated
municipal dumping site has been assigned eight kilometres from
Alaverdi, where the garbage is buried in the ground.”

But Eritsian said the city needs millions of dollars in investment
before its problems are solved, “We need new waste treatment
facilities on the river; we need to replace our decrepit sewers,
rebuild the water supply system, and set up waste disposal facilities
in the villages. Major polluters, such as industrial enterprises, must
build their own environmental systems. No one has been held
responsible for what is going on.”

As the solutions for these manifold problems all depends on money,
hopes are now being pinned on the US government’s Millennium Challenge
programme. The Armenian government is hoping to receive up to 900
million dollars from the initiative, much of which would be channelled
into water and environmental projects.

Anush Sarkisian is deputy editor of the Loru Marz newspaper in
Vanadzor.