In December 2022, affiliates of the authoritarian Azerbaijani government disguised as climate activists swarmed the Lachin Corridor: the one road considered a lifeline to the Republic of Artsakh, composed primarily of ethnic Armenians. Footage from the protests showed a woman dressed in a fur coat, gripping a dove in one hand, gesticulating wildly while declaring that the land “belongs to Azerbaijan”. When she attempted to throw the dove into the air, it dropped dead.
So began Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s blockade of Artsakh (also known by the Azerbaijani name “Nagorno-Karabakh”), a nine-month siege that subjected civilians to a brutal winter without heat, electricity, internet, food, or medicine, and culminated in a military offensive that displaced 99% of the region’s population of over 100,000 Armenians.
By means of white phosphorus and other banned weapons, Azerbaijan’s blockade depleted water reservoirs and destroyed thousands of trees, causing long-term environmental damage. Given this situation alone, it would seem Aliyev’s regime has no interest in human rights, international law, or helping to build a sustainable future.
Yet in November 2024, Azerbaijan will host the United Nations Climate Conference (COP29) in Baku.
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This is not the first time Armenians have felt betrayed by the UN. When the UN refused to acknowledge ethnic cleansing in Artsakh after Aliyev donated $1 million USD to UN-Habitat, New York City-based Armenian activists Sara and Nadia (who requested anonymity) responded by forming their own grassroots collective, Armenian Organized Resistance (ARMOR) Coalition.
With a focus on building international solidarity around issues affecting not only Armenians, but other victims of colonialism, such as Palestinians, ARMOR is building a coalition of organizations and activists to pressure the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) into relocating COP29, and overhauling their process to ensure the climate conferences serve the people most affected by climate change.
“The decision to allow Azerbaijan to host is really just dirty from start to finish,” said Nadia. “These COPs are… one of the very few opportunities where all of these leaders can come together and create something that benefits the entire planet, and the fact that they’re wasting it and using these things to do damage is just not acceptable. The whole process needs to be overhauled.”
That process allows countries with abysmal records on both human rights and environmentalism to hold the conferences hostage. This year’s COP president was decided by Eastern Europe, but Russia used its power to prevent European Union countries from hosting. Armenia placed a bid, but withdrew after Azerbaijan offered the release of 32 Armenian POWs, tortured in Azerbaijani jails for years, as a bargaining chip.
Aside from rewarding human rights violations and war crimes, allowing Azerbaijan to host will obstruct the goals of the Paris Agreement. After depleting many of its own native fossil fuel resources, Azerbaijan’s economy now depends on exporting sanctioned Russian oil to Europe and the US, allowing Western governments to condemn the war in Ukraine while actively financing it.
Arshak Makichyan, an environmental activist who lost his Russian citizenship for protesting Putin’s climate policies and the war in Ukraine, stressed the environmental consequences of supporting Russia and Azerbaijan’s oil industries. “We have five or six years to do something with the climate crisis, to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement, and if instead of doing something real, we will be just greenwashing our war crimes, it’s not really a good sign for our future.”
Sara pointed out that the wars waged in Ukraine and Artsakh are themselves environmentally destructive. “If it’s not oil, then they will use war to destroy our environment. And we are still fine to hold the climate conference in Baku.”
The decision will be especially harmful to Armenians. Two months before the blockade, British multinational BP advised Aliyev that Artsakh contained renewable energy resources that could help fulfill Azerbaijan’s 10-year energy contracts with Europe. Since clearing the region of Armenians, Aliyev plans to convert Artsakh into a “green energy zone,” which entails widespread destruction of millennia-old Armenian cultural heritage sites – destruction that COP29 will directly fund.
A frightening precedent exists for Azerbaijan’s genocidal erasure of Armenian culture. After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Azerbaijan destroyed 98% of Armenian cultural heritage sites in Nakhichevan.
Armenian-born Makichyan, whose maternal grandparents were deported from the Nakhichevan Republic by the Soviet Union, sees this erasure as the latest blow in a dispiriting cycle of colonization and displacement. “Half of Armenia was given to Turkey after the genocide, and then territories like Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhichevan were given to Azerbaijan by the Soviets. So, for us Armenians, it was kind of a continuous genocide, and it continues until today.”
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Though Western governments have failed to hold Azerbaijan accountable with oil sanctions, Makichyan had hoped his allies in the climate movement would raise awareness of Aliyev’s crimes, which obviously harm the environment. But he was disappointed to note that the biggest environmental NGOs – including Greenpeace, WWF, and Climate Action Network – did not issue a single tweet about the crisis in Artsakh.
At a UN workshop for journalists in Bonn, Germany, dedicated to discussing coverage of COP29, he was forced to leave by an official UN representative simply for asking a question about human rights violations in Azerbaijan. He was told that all discussions should focus on climate issues and renewable energy, not human rights.
This lack of support from environmental organizations can be attributed to a number of factors: a focus on fundraising over serving constituents; the presence of Turkish Grey Wolves in Germany, known to threaten journalists who try to speak on Armenian issues; and Aliyev’s extensive international propaganda – some of which can be found on Azerbaijan’s COP29 website.
Recognizing that an international grassroots movement is needed to combat this apathy, ARMOR has engaged activists like Makichyan for a letter-writing campaign to COP29 attendees. Through the group’s website, anyone can email projected attendees, encouraging them to demand the UN relocate the conference to an alternative venue, such as Bonn.
If they must participate, ARMOR asks that attendees use the opportunity to advocate for the immediate release of all Armenian and Azerbaijani political prisoners, the safe return of Armenians to Artsakh with international peacekeepers, and greater vigilance from investment organizations over their funds, lest they go towards Aliyev’s project of conquering the Armenian territory he calls “Western Azerbaijan”. Speaking out is especially important, given that the conference will be too dangerous for Armenians to attend.
By contacting COP29 attendees, ARMOR aims to identify which organizations are willing to speak out against greenwashing, and which remain silent. After 7,000 letters sent, Sara and Nadia have received a shocking number of angry replies. They are considering publishing a list of these complicit organizations at a later date.
In spite of the resources marshaled against them, the long history of Armenian persecution, and the limited time left to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals, ARMOR’s campaign expresses optimism about the power of ordinary citizens to raise awareness and demand change on a global scale. Readers interested in joining the campaign can do so here.
For the first time, 2023 saw global warming exceed 1.5C across an entire year. It is more important than ever that the climate movement follow ARMOR’s example in recognizing human rights as inseparable from climate justice, and holding institutions like the UN to account. “We are actively reaching out to everyone to be involved in this issue,” said Sara. “Together, we can make the difference. Separately, it’s much harder.”