Vice Speaker of the National Assembly Alen Simonyan said to reporters about environmentalists fighting against the operation of the mine at Amulsar, “People who write ‘Save Amulsar’ don’t know where it’s located. When they were cutting down trees in Ijevan, environmentalists were silent. Environmentalists can’t do things halfway. Now it’s trendy to create a hashtag and cause an uproar.”
Environmental lawyer and head of the Armenian Forests NGO Nazeli Vardanyan told Aravot Daily in an interview that she had difficulty providing an evaluation for what Alen Simonyan said. “How am I supposed to respond to his jargon? My upbringing won’t allow me to do so. How am I supposed to comment on such stupid statements?”
Then, Vardanyan noted, “This is not the way that a statesman should speak. I don’t know what kind of jargon they use, but they forgot that they’re no longer people who protest in the streets and are instead National Assembly representatives. Therefore, they need to speak to the people normally instead of insulting them. That’s not the way to speak.”
Regarding Alen Simonyan’s observation on the instance of the trees in Ijevan, Nazeli Vardanyan said, “I have given many interviews on tree cutting in Ijevan and I have also written legislation on it. No one needs to speak as much as I did about it. Let him go and study it.”
