The hyper-intelligent powers that be decided to hold COP29 in a genocidal country dependent on fossil fuels. Azerbaijan is a country guilty of both greenwashing and peace-washing.
Azerbaijan’s proposed agenda for COP29 leaves out discussing the phase-out of fossil fuels. The country in the Caucasus region recently increased oil and gas production. According to an investigation by Global Witness, it plans to further increase gas production by a third more over the next decade. That will lead to 781 tons of carbon, more than twice the UK’s annual carbon emissions. Fossil fuel companies are forecasted to spend $41.4 billion on the country’s gas production. That amount would pay for the installation of over 1,170 offshore wind turbines.
According to the International Energy Agency, Azerbaijan has a “heavy dependence on extractive industries.” It is a significant producer of crude oil and natural gas. Most of its electricity is generated by natural gas (over 90 percent in 2022), and the country’s electricity generation has increased by more than 50 percent since 2010.
Oil and gas comprise more than 90 percent of Azeri exports. Top foreign gas investors in Azerbaijan include BP, TotalEnergies, and Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil and gas producer. Those three companies are forecasted to spend $16.8 billion on fossil fuel production in the country.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, signed a pact with dictator Ilham Aliyev to double Azeri gas exports to the EU by 2027. The goal is to reduce the EU’s dependency on Russian gas. Lukoil is the country’s third-largest gas producer. Two days before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Azerbaijan signed an agreement with Russia. Aliyev, the hereditary dictator of Azerbaijan, declared that the agreement “brings our relations to the level of an alliance.” After the invasion, Russian oil exports to Azerbaijan quadrupled.
Azerbaijan has great renewable energy potential. Nonetheless, renewable energy was only 1.5 percent of its total energy supply in 2022. It has vast solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydropower resources. The country committed to a 35 percent reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 from 1990 levels.
Continuing the Armenian Genocide
Azerbaijan’s 2020 and 2023 military campaigns in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), an ancient Armenian territory, were acts of genocide, two experts—scholars Luis Moreno Ocampo and Juan Ernesto Mendez—concluded. Ocampo compared Azerbaijan’s actions to the Holocaust. Along with starvation, Azerbaijan used the denial of medical aid and military bombardment in September 2023 to ethnically cleanse Artsakh of its indigenous Armenians.
“Starvation is the invisible Genocide weapon,” says Moreno Ocampo
By September 2023, all Artsakh residents began fleeing to Armenia proper. Mendez noted that as of late September this year, there was widespread looting in Artsakh. In the area’s capital, Stepanakert, “satellite imagery reveals hundreds of incidents of what appears to be ransacking across the city,” according to a Bellingcat investigation.
In October, Azerbaijan rejected a peace deal. Relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan have not been good since the fall of the Soviet Union, when Russia’s might kept the two countries from war. However, in the late 80s, Azeris attacked and killed Armenian residents in three towns, including Azerbaijan’s capital. In 1918, Russians created the country of Azerbaijan from stolen Armenian, Georgian, and Iranian lands. The name of the country comes from an Iranian region. That same year, Azeris massacred Armenians in Baku.
In 1915, the Ottoman Turks began a genocide against Armenians in Western Armenia, present-day Eastern Turkey. Three out of four of all Armenians there perished. My great-great grandfathers were beheaded. Azerbaijan and Turkey are “brother” nations, as the Azeris are Turkic people, and they are continuing the genocide their brothers started a century ago.
The UN’s Endorsement of Genocide
The Lemkin Institute, named for Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide partly to describe what happened to my ancestors, opposes the UN’s decision to hold COP 29 in Azerbaijan. The Institute describes Aliyev as having a “genocidal Armenophobic ideology.” By allowing a genocidal petro-nation to host COP29, the UN endorses genocide and shows that it’s not serious about climate change.
“At a time when the world population has lost faith in international institutions, the United Nations needs to get its head out of the sand and end its diplomatic sponsorship of the genocidal state of Azerbaijan, starting with COP29,” says a statement by the Lemkin Institute.
Aliyev’s father became the ruler of Azerbaijan in 1991 after the Soviet Union fell. After the elder Aliyev died, his son ruled. The country silences dissenters through jail or murder. Many Artsakh Armenians captured by Azeris, including Artsakh’s former leaders, are POWs in Azerbaijan.
You can do something to bring awareness to the implications of COP29 in Azerbaijan. Share this story on social media. Do what legacy media refuses to do.
Image by Marco Fieber on Flickr
