For episode 149, Elia Ayoub sat down with Karena Avedissian and Anna, TFTT returnees and co-hosts of Obscuristan, a podcast which is soon joining the broader network (whaaat? – We talk about that at the beginning of the episode).
We talked about Azerbaijan hosting COP29 next year, the global climate conference, and why it might be a problem for a petro-dictatorship to host a climate conference. We discussed how Azerbaijan is trying to greenwash its recent genocide of the Armenians of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh by claiming the area, devoid of its human population, has now achieved net-zero (yes, we’re not joking). We also talked more broadly about the Armenian struggle for justice and what we might learn from the Palestinian one.
You’ll also hear Elia’s exclusive, world-premiere take on Aliyev’s ridiculous mustache.
The Fire These Times is a proud member of From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: the (newly aired!) Mutual Aid Podcast, Politically Depressed, Obscuristan, and Antidote Zine.
Episode Credits
Episode Credits
Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Elia Ayoub
Episode design: Elia Ayoub
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
It’s really fucked up to see Azerbaijan talking about creating “net-zero” energy in an empty land devoid of people—of course there’s no energy usage there right now. But on top of that, you can’t have ecologically clean policies without the Indigenous peoples of these lands. It’s not possible. It’s an oxymoron. If you remove the people, you remove an intrinsic portion of the ecosystem.
Anna: My name is Anna. I am a co-host of Obscuristan with Karena; we will be returning hopefully very soon, and we’ll be joining the larger The Fire These Times network with Elia, which we’re really excited about, because as you’re about to learn in this episode, there is a shocking amount of connections between the struggles that many different people face, and we want to address them.
Karena Avedissian: Hi everybody, I’m Karena. I live in Armenia. I have a former academic background; I am currently working as an analyst in Yerevan. As Anna said, I’m a co-host of Obscuristan and we’re super excited to be joining the family very soon.
Elia Ayoub: There was a photo sent on one of the Signal groups that Karena and I are in—describe it, go for it.
KA: It’s a surreptitiously-taken photo of a screen at what I assume is the Azerbaijani stand at the COP pavilion. On the bottom left corner of the screen, it says: “Karabakh is the first region in Azerbaijan to achieve net-zero.” That’s where this all began.
A: Do you want to tell us what COP is?
EA: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is what it’s called, or the Conference of Parties, COP for short. It’s the yearly climate conference, the biggest one and clearly the most consequential one. The big Paris one of some years ago is when they agreed on the basic problem; this time around they seem to have agreed that maybe fossil fuel isn’t amazing, and it needs to be phased out (although there’s no actual timeline for that).
Lots of problems with COP; I did an episode on COP some months ago with two scientists who are involved with the IPCC, and I’ve had Julia Steinberger on a couple times—she is one of the authors of the IPCC document, if folks want to check those out.
A: And since Azerbaijan has been selected to host this conference next year, and since the really fun photo leak that Elia and Karena just described, we’re going to be talking about Azerbaijan’s ties to ecofascism and greenwashing.
I want to take it back one year. This is not the origin of Azerbaijan’s greenwashing, but it’s one of the more amazing examples of it. Almost exactly one year ago now, on December 12 [2022], Azerbaijani eco-activists blocked the Lachin corridor, which was at the time the only road connected Armenia to the Republic of Artsakh, or Nagorno-Karabakh. They cited mining projects in Nagorno-Karabakh as the reason for blocking this road, saying that the ecology of the Republic of Artsakh (they would have said Nagorno-Karabakh) was being destroyed, and that their rights were being violated.
Somehow, this little group of eco-activists managed to block the entire Lachin corridor so effectively that nobody could get in or out of Artsakh for the next year. They were of course not working alone; it was a government-backed, government-supported “protest.” But there was this bizarre month where Armenians had to tell people that these weren’t actually eco-activists. For me personally, that was the most bizarre several weeks of my life, having to genuinely engage with the idea that there was a small protest group in Azerbaijan, a country where protests are routinely shut down, and don’t even spring up because they’re going to be shut down so quickly—but there was a little rag-tag group of eco-activists who were just so concerned about the mines in Nagorno-Karabakh that they had managed to shut down travel in and out of the country completely!
This of course is not the case. It was a front by the Azerbaijani government, which they quickly gave up on. Nonetheless it did not stop media from reporting on it, and it didn’t stop earnest conversation happening internationally about this. This of course led to the months-long blockade of the Republic of Artsakh which led to food shortages, water shortages, electricity shortages, gas shortages, medicine shortages, and eventually the ethnic cleansing of the entire 120,000-person population of the Republic of Artsakh. I would characterize this as genocide, despite the fact that all 120,000 people did not die.
There are no more Armenians left in Nagorno-Karabakh. They are all refugees now, and their status, though dire, is not the topic of this podcast. You can listen to some of our other appearances to learn about that. But yeah, this little vignette can ground us in Azerbaijan’s lofty ecological aspirations.
KA: To contrast that with actual grassroots environmental activism in Azerbaijan: just six months after the blockade of Artsakh began, in June of 2023, there was a demonstration consisting mostly of older women, and it was put down by the police—there were videos of gratuitous violence; [police] were spraying pepper spray in their faces. This is just to compare and contrast an actual authentic environmental protest in Azerbaijan which is not sanctioned by the state, just another foundation to the understanding that the eco-activist “protest” that initiated the blockade, before soldiers formalized it with a checkpoint, was not an authentic one.
I can’t believe I’m saying this. It’s just obvious. But because Azerbaijan is saying it…
A: That is the encapsulation of Azerbaijan’s entire ecological policy. There’s this veneer that we have to engage with for some godawful fucking reason, even though it’s patently bizarre. The “protest” that started the blockade was such a level of Absurdistan comedy you could have filmed it and put it on Borat. This is not intellectually informative, but it is hysterical: there was a scene where a woman was speaking passionately about peace, and tried to release a dove into the air, and this poor creature was being flung—she was kind of rattling it left and right, and then she flung this bird into the air and it promptly flopped. It was thrown into the air and then just dropped dead.
KA: She was like, squeezing it.
A: It’s so awful, but so absurd and stupid. The most ridiculous sights were coming out of this protest. And for some reason we still had to engage with the idea that there were eco-activists blocking the road. But this is also true of Azerbaijan’s policy when it comes to green energy. Azerbaijan has long had these bizarre aspirations for net-zero in Karabakh. I remember them talking about it in 2020, during the Artsakh war. They talked about green energy in Shushi, and there were rumblings and tweets about building net-zero housing in Shushi, and things like that. It’s really dark and scary to be talking about the amazing green housing you’re going to build in an area that you’re planning on ethnically cleansing. And then it actually came to be.
One of the things I want to address is that analysts indicated that conflict over water was one of the things that was driving Azerbaijan’s desire for the war in 2020, and even as far back as 2016 (and even further), there was dispute over water and dams in Nagorno-Karabakh. Basically, Azerbaijan has a lot of trouble getting water into its country because seventy-five percent of the water in Azerbaijan comes from outside of Azerbaijan. The rivers and the water in Karabakh is perfect for damming, because it’s a mountainous area; there was a long dispute over the dams in this area.
Without going too much into the details, Azerbaijan wants to start damming that water, and wants to start redirecting that water into Azerbaijan, not necessarily so they can achieve net-zero as a country, but because they wast to start exporting their natural gas. We talked in some previous episodes about how Azerbaijan is positioning itself as a natural gas partner to Europe, and has started to export more natural gas—it’s also starting to refine Russian oil, which is even more incredible, because that means that Europe is still going to be importing Russian oil, it’s just going to be refined in Azerbaijan now instead of in Russia. They are the perfect middleman.
They’re exporting their own natural gas and they’re exporting Russian natural gas and Russian oil, and in order to meet the energy needs of their own people they’re going to start damming water and using hydropower within Azerbaijan. This doesn’t actually help Azerbaijan’s use of alternative energy sources; it allows them to continue to increase and ramp up their production of fossil fuels to export into Europe. And in order to supplement that, they need something else, and because they don’t have enough water traveling into Azerbaijan, and because water agreements between the countries in the region haven’t been modified since the Soviet Union, they are able to greenwash genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh.
EA: There’s so much there. A couple of points: the damming aspect of it is something I would like to explore one day, because it’s a fascinating thing that most governments had in common at one point. The Americans pioneered it in many ways, and then it was exported as a tactic. It started becoming discredited in the eighties, but there is probably a correlation between a government being authoritarian and therefore being less likely to accept feedback from scientists or eco-activists, and between being less authoritarian and being more amenable to that.
In Lebanon we had a very similar problem of dammings, which I won’t get into too much. I wrote a few pieces on that if you want to look those up, on the Bisri Valley. The reason why the government wanted to dam that valley was because there was a program from the fifties and they just didn’t give up on it. There was no energy need for that, the cost was going to be too high.
That’s the first thing. The second thing is that you mentioned whitewashing genocide, and we found out before recording that Azerbaijan, in that same pavilion at COP in Dubai—this is the headline: “Azerbaijan Presents Green Energy Potential of Karabakh and Eastern Zangazur at COP28 in Dubai.” This is an Azerbaijani website, if that’s not obvious. What is problematic about this framing, besides the obvious greenwashing (in that it’s not green energy potential, it’s bullshit, and we’re talking about a petro-dictatorship that obviously wants to do everything to distract from the fact it’s a petro-dictatorship)?
We know about Karabakh, and we’ll get into it more. But what about the term “Eastern Zangazur?” Why is that also problematic, for folks who don’t know?
KA: Zangazur is the Azerbaijani/Turkish word for the southern Armenian province of Syunik, and if you look at the map of Armenia, in the southern part it’s a strip of land that goes all the way down to Iran. On the west is Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan’s exclave; to the south is Iran, and to the east is Azerbaijan, where Artsakh was. To call this region “Eastern Zangazur”—this is a new term; just before recording, Anna and I had to look it up, because we’d never heard of this.
EA: It was officially established on 7 July 2021, according to Wikipedia.
KA: It hasn’t really been deployed that much until now. It has this irridentist foundation because, as scholar Laurence Broers has written, when you have an Eastern Zangazur it implies there is a Western Zangazur, which is the Armenian province of Syunik. It’s laying claim to sovereign Armenian territory, after Azerbaijan’s main argument against Armenia in the international community being that it’s violating territorial integrity.
A: I also want to note that the exclave Karena mentioned, Nakhchivan, was also ethnically cleansed of its Armenian population.
KA: I want to talk a bit about the geopolitical aspect of the greenwashing that Azerbaijan is doing. First of all, the screenshot that we were just discussing, the “net-zero” one—in case it’s not obvious for your listeners, this is because there is no human activity right now. It’s because it’s been ethnically cleansed and genocided of its Armenians. There’s no jobs, there’s no industry, there’s nothing happening there. That’s why.
This isn’t greenwashing in the classic sense. An example of a classic greenwashing campaign is BP rebranding itself into “Beyond Petroleum,” to be able to say things like We’re really into renewable energy. But Azerbaijan isn’t even that desperate to convince us of its green credentials. It’s rather creative PR. It knows it’s done something really bad, so it does this conjuring trick. Don’t look at the fact that our genocidal policies and three years of atrocities against Armenians forcibly expelled them in their entirety. Instead look at this nice net-zero status over here!
It’s interesting also because—is this greenwashing new? It’s not, as Anna mentioned. It started with the beginning of the blockade, and there are probably other examples before. But in terms of PR for Azerbaijan, it’s not new. Azerbaijan has been engaging in this kind of targeted PR campaign to improve its image internationally. Greenwashing is one example; another is perhaps its most notable one, a PR pillar: Azerbaijan as a “multicultural state.” What’s funny is, in preparation for this episode I tried to access Azerbaijan’s website on multiculturalism, and it’s blocked for me because I’m in Armenia. So I can’t read about how multicultural it is.
Greenwashing isn’t this shiny new thing for the country. It has to be seen within the context of a multi-pronged PR campaign to rescue the image of the country. Because at its heart it is an authoritarian petrostate where the president took over from his father and made his wife vice president, and ethnically cleansed the Armenians of Artsakh—genocided them. In the aftermath of that genocide, it has intensified its repression against its own domestic dissidents to the point where just recently they’ve essentially arrested all of their independent journalists.
About the multiculturalism PR campaign in Azerbaijain: it’s true that different linguistic and religious communities coexist peacefully in Azerbaijan in a secular context. But let’s also keep in mind that Azerbaijan’s post-independence narrative is largely based on hatred of Armenians, and the fact that other ethnic minorities in Azerbaijan have been arrested and imprisoned repeatedly. When it says it’s “multicultural,” it’s literally just referring to the fact of its cultural diversity, not that it has actual multicultural policies or it enacts multiculturalism.
We need to see this greenwashing campaign within the broader context of whitewashing its image after it does incredibly abhorrent things and constantly gets away with them in the international community. It hasn’t paid any price for the genocide of Artsakh Armenians. This is something that, through a contact, I know for a fact: Azerbaijani officials inside Azerbaijan have said that they are shocked that they got away with it.
A: I also want to not only address the fact that Azerbaijan got away with the total ethnic cleansing of its Armenian population as a blueprint for—I don’t want to call it a “blueprint” for Israel’s policies in Gaza, because I don’t know who learns from who anymore between Azerbaijan and Israel; they’re very linked. But to Karena’s point about Azerbaijan’s reliance on its multiculturalism, it uses its relationship to Israel as a substitute for its relationship to its own Jewish population. There’s a lot to be said about Azerbaijan’s relationship to its Jewish population, much of which is very likely positive—but Azerbaijan relies a lot on its relationship with Israel to bolster this multicultural, multi-religious status.
Something else that is important and interesting is that in its development of its new “green” energy policies, Azerbaijan is relying on Israel and Turkey. Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, signed a first-of-its-kind work agreement in Azerbaijan in April of 2022, because Azerbaijan wants to rework its entire water management system. So they signed an agreement with the Israeli national water management company to rework their entire management system after the Artsakh war, after they regained control of key dams and waterways. So immediately they signed an agreement with an Israeli company to start developing those.
Israel is not the only one. Turkish companies have also started “developing” these water projects. Something interesting to note there as well is that Turkey has used water as a way to control its own dissident and ethnic rights movement (that was a terrible way to describe the Kurdish liberation movement, but that’s what I’m talking about). Turkey used the Southeast Anatolia Project and its effect on downstream rivers to leave Syria and Iraq in severe drought, which increased Turkey’s ability to have influence in these countries, which severely weakened Kurdish national movements, because now, in the lands they inhabit, they rely on Turkish national control of water to be able to survive.
This is a very well-worked-out blueprint, and it didn’t get a lot of coverage in any media—I don’t even want to say international media. There were great articles written in Eurasianet by Nareg Kuyumjian which I’ve been relying heavily on; there was a VOA report published in 2021 which talks about the water drop in the Euphrates river increasing tensions between Syrian Kurds and Turkey; and there was some OC Media reporting on it. But this was never considered a conflict over water—which I do think would be a mischaracterization of it—but I think the fact that Azerbaijan immediately saw the physical resources in Karabakh that they could develop, exploit, and control without the Armenian people is significant.
It reminds me a lot of the videos coming out of Israel with people talking about What would you build in Gaza if there were no people there? I remember very clearly in 2020—there isn’t the same media access to Azerbaijan as there is to Israel, so you’re not going to get the same interviews of extremist people in the streets. But there were tweets of people talking about the housing, the beautiful eco-resorts that were going to be built in Karabakh after the war. That kind of imagining for a land that not only isn’t yours but that you need to ethnically cleanse in order to have control over—it’s perverse, especially when you consider the status of Azerbaijan as a petro-dictatorship.
But it’s also perverse on its own. Land does not exist outside of its people; land has never existed outside the people who have lived on it. There are fewer narratives about Armenians as Indigenous in relation to land—in part, I think, because we lived through the Soviet Union, which was a heavily industrialized society, and the connection to land was stripped away from people.
KA: Something I’ve thought about a lot is that narratives and stories from the genocide seem to focus on the middle- and wealthy classes in cities, which plays into this idea that They’re not really from anywhere, they’re just bourgeois people with nice clothes and they go to the studios and they take nice photographs. Whereas the majority of Armenians who were impacted by genocide—murdered, exiled—where peasants. My father’s side of the family doesn’t have any photographs. They couldn’t take anything with them. There’s no such artifacts. So the narrative around Armenians’ connection to land is also affected by that.
A: I agree. There’s less narrative about it for that reason as well, when it comes to the genocide, and then the industrialization of the Soviet Union was deliberately designed to make people less agrarian, less emotionally connected to the land—which has really impacted Armenians’ ability to talk about land in a way that sounds familiar to Indigenous struggle. But there’s a really great Instagram account called “Learn for Artsakh” and they’ve done really incredible distribution and translation of important pieces, a kind of archival work. Information coming out of Karabakh in the Soviet Union period, as my parents knew it, is also limited, because so much of it is in Russian. There’s just so much translation and information management that needs to happen for even Armenians to access this information.
My family grew up really attached to mulberry trees. There’s lots of Armenian poems on mulberry trees. There’s comedic movies about families fighting over mulberry trees. You usually know the trees that grow on your property; if you have a walnut tree or a mulberry tree—I didn’t know this, but apparently Leonid Hurunts, who was writing contemporaneously, said:
For centuries the Armenians of Artsakh have planted mulberry trees in their gardens. Mulberries are dried, pekmez [medicinal syrup] is boiled from them, and vodka is driven. Forty-five bulldozers in one day rushed into centuries-old trees, destroying almost eighty percent of the gardens. Why was this done? Isn’t it clear? To undermine the forms of the peasants and force them to leave their homes, a kind of genocide forcing the Armenians to leave.
So there is this history of ecological destruction and continued divorcing of Armenians from their connection to land. I don’t want to overstate it, but I want to be really clear that Armenians are connected intrinsically to the land they come from. There is a reason Armenian iconography, poetry, music, songs, are always about mountains. But to me we’re left with that as our only connection, when in reality the Armenians of Artsakh have lived in harmony with this land for centuries, even for thousands of years, and interruptions of various empires shouldn’t change that that is true.
There’s layers of this type of greenwashing, and there’s layers to the way that Azerbaijan has portrayed its ecological development of Karabakh, that are all rooted in genocide.
EA: The elephant in the room, at least in my mind, is how similar these are to Israeli tactics. What you were saying about mulberry trees you can say the same of olive trees in Palestine. And the obsession that we see with a lot of Israeli settlers in the West Bank with burning and destroying olive trees as an almost compulsive thing to do—that’s always struck me as dark and fascinating. A lot of these olive trees go back to Ottoman times.
The other thing is, “greening the desert” was always part of the initial mythos of the Zionist movement; Ben Gurion mentioned that. And obviously, as you mentioned, linked to Indigenous struggles elsewhere, it’s manifest destiny repackaged. It’s interesting, the parallels; it’s basically the exact same playbook—the actors are different, the vocabulary is slightly different, the languages are different. But in terms of How to Colonialism or how to exploit—it’s definitely a phenomenon in colonial or colonized spaces.
KA: I had the privilege of visiting the grandfather of a man who is crypto-Armenian living in Van, Turkey. Crypto-Armenians are Armenians who survived the genocide and remained, and in most cases they adopted Islam as their religion, changed their names, became Turkish or Kurdish outwardly, but maintain certain traditions within the home, sometimes certain words, or things like putting crosses into lavash bread before baking them—often, generations down, not even knowing why they do that anymore, because they don’t know that they’re Armenian.
In some cases they do. In some cases they have forgotten and the the grandmother on her deathbed mentions it, saying I’m Armenian. There’s lots of these stories. So this man is an Armenian, from my grandmother’s village near Van, and he took me to his grandfather’s house, and we’re standing outside the gate, and I didn’t quite understand what we were doing or where we were—I didn’t understand the context. I was just standing outside, and he started pointing out all the trees, saying, My grandfather planted this cherry tree, and this apricot tree.
I heard voices coming from inside, and I was like, Wait a minute, what? This guy didn’t speak English, we were communicating through Google Translate. And I start putting the camera of my phone over the gate to take photos of the garden, and he got uncomfortable and said, Other people live there now. I was like, What do you mean? And he said, Well, one of the leaders of the massacres in Van was rewarded with my grandfather’s house, so these are his descendants living in the house.
That goes to the parallels with the settlers in Palestine. There’s that famous photo of the Palestinian woman and her husband standing outside the door speaking to the people who live there now.
EA: If it’s the same video I’m thinking of, the people living there were from Brooklyn.
KA: That’s the one.
A: I hadn’t thought about the genocidal framework from western Armenia in a long time. But you’re right. We often mention that people didn’t talk about the genocide after it happened; it took time before it was studied, before the history was archived or spoken about. There were some survivors who immediately started talking about it, like Aurora Mardiganian. But for the most part there was a lot of silence, and that also led to the history that’s remained (on top of all the other reasons that are true for history generally) being so tied to the upper class.
We know a lot about houses and insurance papers and life insurance policies, and all these things. But the day-to-day connections to the land—I don’t want to say it’s been lost, but it’s been minimized. This wave of greenwashing from Azerbaijan—literally planned by Israeli companies supported by Turkey—has made me revisit the spiritual aspect of connection to land in a big way. At our core, that is what we’re connected to; at our core, that’s what we’re talking about. But for so many reasons, all informed by empire, Armenians have been placed into a different narrative: one of national movements, one of self-determination, things like that.
I was looking at a lot of Palestinian advocacy, and I was impressed and also really emotionally touched by how much their connection to land has been preserved over many years, how much that’s remained. I’m absolutely certain that much of that is intrinsic to how much Palestinians love their land. I don’t want to say Armenians don’t love their land, because it’s not that. It has to do with how many empires have tried to strategically force Armenians from the connection to their land, in many different ways.
It’s really fucked up to see Azerbaijan talking about creating “net-zero” energy in an empty land devoid of people. Of course they don’t have energy usage there right now. But on top of that, you can’t have ecologically clean policies without the Indigenous peoples of these lands. It’s not possible. It’s an oxymoron. If you remove the people, you’ve removed an intrinsic portion of the ecosystem.
KA: Segueing from Anna reminding us of the connections with Azerbaijani aggression and militarism, I wanted to talk a little bit about the context of Azerbaijan winning the bid for COP29.
I was looking at how countries bid for it: applications get assessed for things like the value of going to that country, whether the country is able to host it, whether they have the facilities, or if they are able to provide security to all these world leaders who are coming. Then regional group members hold consultations to determine which country from their region will make an offer to host COP. In this case, Azerbaijan made an offer, and Armenia blocked it—and Armenia bid as well to be the host of COP29.
Then what happened is that Azerbaijan offered a prisoner exchange deal to Armenia. Azerbaijan offered to hand over thirty-two Armenian POWs in exchange for Armenia dropping its bid for COP29 and supporting Azerbaijan’s candidacy. Azerbaijan had been illegally holding over fifty Armenian prisoners of war, most of whom were captured after the end of the 2020 war, contra to the 2020 peace agreement. So—Armenia agreed.
What’s interesting (and by “interesting” I mean below the fucking belt) is that Armenia was also to hand over two Azerbaijani POWs. That’s not problematic in and of itself; it’s that these were soldiers who wandered into Armenian territory in April 2023, and one of them murdered a fifty-six-year-old Armenian man who was working as a security guard at a waste disposal facility, and had just been sentenced to life imprisonment last week, when this deal was made. So this was the cost.
A: The prisoners of war that Azerbaijan took, in violation of international law—they didn’t even always acknowledge that they were prisoners of war; they often kept them in international legal limbo. Some of them were tried and convicted of crimes in kangaroo courts, which is similar to how the US treated its prisoners of war in Guantánamo Bay. But it’s underpinned any and all of Azerbaijan’s actions and ability to maneuver, because there’s always these people hanging. For thirty-two people to be released, you can see how significant this greenwashing campaign is to Azerbaijan.
EA: We’re still learning how the current COP in the UAE was perceived by UAE officials and what they hoped they would get out of this: a combination of greenwashing making them look good, and also (we later learned) actual oil deals they were hoping to get. This was leaked; there was a lot of controversy and noise, and supposedly they denied they were hoping to do this. I have the actual statement here: [Sultan] al-Jaber, the president of COP in the UAE, asserted that “the UAE does not need the COP presidency to establish business deals.”
This might be true. But it’s interesting, because I know a bit about why it’s problematic for authoritarian governments, literal monarchies like the UAE (and in the case of Azerbaijan next year, petro-dictatorships) to host COP. At the same time, I’m more of the opinion that if they want this kind of international attention, let’s make sure they regret it. One thing that the UAE never has is protests. They are extremely rare. For one thing, most of the population in the UAE are not Emiratis and are deprived of citizenship, are migrant laborers from south Asia. For two, the government doesn’t allow them anyway—but there were some protests.
There were statements from some folks attending COP (and the same was true of Egypt last year) that in any other circumstances would simply not be allowed. Last year in Egypt there were statements from folks supporting the release of Alaa [Abd al-Fattah], for example, and other Egyptian prisoners. This year there were folks, including speakers on panels, saying Stop the genocide in Gaza, which for the UAE’s official position is not good, because they are now allies with Israel, since they normalized after the Abraham Accords.
What I’m saying is not that this is ideal. It’s not. It’s more that if they’re actively seeking some attention, it’s also an opportunity to make them regret this a tiny bit. It depends what will be allowed and not allowed at COP. At COP there are certain guidelines that, in theory, governments hosting COP have to allow.
There is also the aspect of tanfees, as we call it in Arabic: “letting air out” is what the term means. I did an entire episode on this in the context of Syria. Sometimes governments want to allow some democratic aspiration to express itself. Do this protest here; we’ll allow a petition. In the Arab world this is often to do with Palestine—but sometimes it actually gets out of hand. They don’t know how to entirely control, once they say Yes to the crowd, whether the crowd will abide by the rules and regulations that are imposed on them by the authorities. And COP is very special, because there are all these people from all over the world who don’t give a shit about Aliyev personally and maybe don’t even know who he is. They are not familiar with this kind of pressure.
I still think it’s a bad idea that they got it. But now they did get it. And I’m hoping they regret it.
KA: I was going to mention Egypt as well, because it was such a good case study in terms of what people were writing about it already, the problematic-ness of Egypt hosting COP27.
I’m not sure about concrete oil and gas deals, but because Azerbaijan isn’t able to draw any internal legitimacy as a political governing body, as a state, because it’s not democratic, it attempts to boost its image in this way, through these big-ticket events. It also hosted Formula One a few years ago. This is clearly something it likes doing. It likes showing itself on the international stage—for years it’s been pouring money into Baku to turn it into a B-side Dubai, making it devoid of any local culture.
When I was reading about the critiques of COP in Egypt, there were so many organizations that came out against it, drawing attention to the political prisoners in Egypt; Greta Thunberg also denounced the event being held in this place that violates basic human rights. Are people fooled? I guess they are; this is why they’re pulling out all the stops to host it. It’s kind of the same with the Olympics, when there are countries lining up to host it.
It seems to me patently problematic.
A: I wonder if it’s as simple as: the more of these events you hold, the more you are a “normal country doing stuff” on the world stage, and these are your side issues. In some ways, that’s also Israel’s goal. We’re only as violent as everyone else! Everybody’s got problems, everyone’s got issues; this is our issue; let us deal with our issue. I think Azerbaijan has similar goals. Everyone’s got problems; we’re solving our problems; it doesn’t mean we can’t host Formula One or strike energy deals with you, or be a part of the green energy movement.
Azerbaijan is also part of the non-aligned movement, which arose in opposition to the Cold War split between Western and Eastern countries. It doesn’t mean anything anymore, but it’s still one of the only blocs in the UN—its weird to talk about it in an universe where it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Armenia never joined it. But there’s a reason Azerbaijan did. They are positioning themselves as a lot of different things: part of the green movement, a power on the world stage that is able to host sporting events and be a name and a player, while simultaneously interacting with nonaligned countries that have prior histories of colonization and want those addressed in international law and the UN. They’re doing everything at once.
To your point, Elia, about protests in Azerbaijan, this is where the relative unknown of Armenian struggle becomes an issue. Palestine has the strength of having become a cause of the global left, in a lot of ways. That is a good thing; that is a righteous and true thing. Armenian struggle has not, for a lot of reasons. This is my theory: the broader Christian movements in the world are largely evangelical and protestant, so they really don’t love orthodoxies to begin with. We’re the wrong kind of Christians for the Christians. And we can’t really fit into a racial paradigm as understood in the West, because race works differently in the Middle East and works even more differently in former Soviet countries. There isn’t really a paradigm we can fit into because of the way that colonization was defined by international law. And there are plenty of reasons that come from Armenians themselves for why Armenia has not come out as a cause of the global left.
But all this is to say that Azerbaijan does not allow Armenian people into Azerbaijan. I’m not saying Armenian nationals—I’m saying Armenian people, period. If you have an Armenian last name, you can’t get into Azerbaijan. As far as I understand, this is an unofficial state policy, but one that is very much enforced. There was a Russian guy who got on a plane, ended up in Baku, and had to turn around and go back because he had an Armenian last name; he was a Russian-Armenian.
They’ve shown willingness to loosen that policy for big events, like a recent football/soccer thing. My dad’s going to kill me for not knowing what it is [the Europa League final in 2019].
KA: But [then-Arsenal midfielder Henrikh] Mkhitaryan had to pull out because they told him they couldn’t guarantee is his safety.
A: There was some back-and-forth on it. Mkhitaryan, an Armenian soccer player who is an Armenian citizen, initially didn’t want to go; I think in the end they were like, Yeah, of course we can guarantee your safety. But he ended up not being able to go. But that’s what I mean. They will loosen their policy—Oh no, of course we’ll let Armenians in—but one, their safety can’t be guaranteed, and two, they have a state policy of not letting Armenians in, and Armenians are in real danger if they go there.
So Armenians can’t go there; Armenians don’t have a lot of allies who are stringent enough and who care about this enough that they’re going to raise hell at this conference. I would love it if Greta Thunberg were to denounce Baku’s hosting of this. That would be great. She’s on point about everything else. Greta, hello. But I think they gain more than they stand to lose, because Azerbaijan is a newer name, too. They’re making a name for themselves; their issues are just starting to make a name for themselves.
I don’t know. If you’re going to COP, please protest. I think that would be great. If you are someone who is there and you happen to be listening, organize yourself. But I don’t know if that’s a high possibility. I’m waiting to see when it’s officially announced and when the image of Karabakh being “net-zero” without people—they’re not even exhaling carbon dioxide! My point is, Azerbaijan has set it up so they’re well-positioned to have this work out better for them than to regret it. It doesn’t mean we can’t stop it.
KA: I agree. One thing we could look out for is what happened in Egypt in the run-up to COP being hosted there: a total clampdown. Arrests of activists—I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw that in Azerbaijan. But at the moment, I’m already seeing that happening in Azerbaijan, and with essentially no independent journalists left, I don’t know what the landscape will look like in Azerbaijan in the run-up, if there’s going to be anyone left to arrest. I don’t know.
A: This always gets me, because I think Armenian struggle is informative; I don’t think it’s small and irrelevant. I think you can see, by the connections between Azerbaijan and Israel and Turkey, how informative and how much of a blueprint it is. You can see how it fits into the cycle. But it’s still relatively unknown, and Azerbaijan has exploited that very well. There’s a perfect storm of Azerbaijan itself being a relative unknown, of their dictatorship clamping down on any internal dissent, there being relatively little internal dissent to begin with. There are anti-Zionist Israelis, but there are so, so few voices that talk about Azerbaijan’s state-building project as fundamentally based on the erasure and genocide of Armenians. That level has not been reached in popular discourse.
When it is reached, it’s in secret—you’ll get anonymous statements. Anyone who ever said that out loud would be jailed.
KA: Or they’re individuals so they don’t really pose a threat as such.
A: Yeah, there’s no movement. So there’s relatively little dissent within Azerbaijan; the dissent that exists, which is brave and really scary and admirable, is clamped down on instantly; and there’s no international attention. There are no independent journalists within Azerbaijan and no one is saying, Hey, why the fuck aren’t there independent journalists within Azerbaijan? There’s this silent storm where they can fill the narrative gap.
The erasure of Armenians across the Middle East, and the erasure of our presence generally as an important people that if we disappear, there’s something wrong—that also feeds into it. Armenians have interacted with so many different people throughout history. There are a lot of people who should notice if we disappear. Certainly in Lebanon, you’d turn around and be like, Where’d everybody go? But I think our contributions and our importance has been minimized across the Middle East broadly, sometimes even for non-genocidal reasons. A lot of different forces are at play there, not only Turkey’s genocide, and that also contributes to a minimization of the issue.
You really don’t see how much Azerbaijan is greenwashing its existence, which is dangerous for the climate movement too! There’s a danger that you’re going to overlook not just this country’s actual record, but their future reliance on fossil fuels, the way that fossil fuels underpin this regime and this state. Azerbaijan: Fossil Fuels and Genocide.
EA: I would argue that sportswashing has been more effective as a tactic than a lot of the other “washings.” Definitely more efficient than pinkwashing, for example, because there are many homophobic countries that don’t care if you’re pinkwashing. Greenwashing and sportswashing tend to go hand-in-hand. These states have an intention—let’s say it’s Bahrain hosting Formula One, or Qatar hosting the football World Cup last year. There’s a difference in attention between a football World Cup (which is the biggest sporting event in the world) and a COP (which is the biggest UN climate event in the world) versus an Olympics, even, which isn’t as big, actually, or a Formula One. I was involved in writing a bunch of different reports on the sportswashing in Bahrain, and to this day the Formula One company keeps on denying that Bahrain does anything wrong.
It’s a worldwide problem, and whenever you have a sporting event—for example the Olympics in Paris soon, and it’s going to be a nightmare for everyone living in Paris, and Parisians know this—it almost has this different vibe. What Qatar did with the World Cup was that one of its main arguments against too much criticism was: Why can’t we do it if France can do it? In the moment, it’s enough to give you pause, and a lot of people, unfortunately, did jump on that bandwagon of defending Qatar during the World Cup, because of course it’s hypocritical for the Americans or the French to complain. But because it’s hypocritical, therefore there isn’t as much attention paid that should be paid. It levels out the playing field, but towards the lowest common denominator.
Israel hosting Eurovision was kind of the same thing. Why can’t we host it if Australia can host it and they’re not even in Europe? Whatever the arguments are, it can work in the moment as long as what pops up in front of the camera looks roughly the same. If you’re watching the best hits of Eurovision, you don’t know if this one is in Tel Aviv or if this one is in Stockholm, because it’s all part of Eurovision. The fact that this can happen, that you can have a video compilation on YouTube, is already a success of Eurovision in Tel Aviv. It served its purpose.
But it’s a different scale with COP and the World Cup. COP is very particular, because they have to abide by certain basic regulations if they host COP. It doesn’t mean they won’t break them, they probably will. But there is some kind of leverage there that is a commonality with a lot of dictatorships, like the IDF one: they are not always good at planning ahead for these kinds of eventualities. They are too full of themselves. It doesn’t mean they won’t plan at all, but it may be that some stuff can be done there that they don’t expect.
A: This is my issue with a state-centric world, period. For regimes to maintain power, they have to do awful things. This isn’t even to say that the awful things Azerbaijan or Israel are doing are uniquely terrible. But I almost think it’s irrelevant. Hypocrisy should point us to an entitlement of violence, more than delegitimize criticism. If hypocrisy is the thing being pointed to as Why shouldn’t we do it, then that means that regime is entitled to violence. Look at who they’re pointing to, and you’ll see the level of violence they feel entitled to.
In a world where states are responsible for the majority of important social or political events, we’re going to deal with this problem, so we should use it to our advantage. I want this to be a reason for activists and people of conscience around the world to recognize the importance of various struggles. There was a tweet going around early in Israel’s genocide in Gaza: Palestine is freeing us. I really do believe that. But I also think there are a lot of struggles that are going to be necessary to free us. I want these conversations to point to them. I want people to see them, and to learn from them, and to participate in them.
I don’t think we’re in a world where a country hosting COP doesn’t have an ulterior motive. It’s not always going to be genocide. It’s unfortunate that it is genocide in this particular instance. But that being said, that should point us in that direction, to say, What can we do, now that we know a piece of their plan? How can we learn from what they’re doing to see it somewhere else?
I don’t think there’s noting to do; I don’t even think there will be no resistance at COP. I think Azerbaijan has planned this well, but I hope people listen and are able to see why this is important, and learn from it.
EA: We talked about a dozen different linked things that each by themselves could be an entire episode, and probably more. But there is an opportunity you just explained very well, Anna: for the most part, these states want to get something out of it. They probably will get a lot of what they want out of it. But I’m hoping that by being organized and thinking about it this way, we’re able to enact some kind of cost to greenwashing. Greenwashing has very little cost and a lot of rewards. Greenwashing should be significantly costlier to multinational corporations and to governments, petro-dictatorships and others. Based on our capacity, we’ll see if we can do some kind of focus on COP in Azerbaijan, and see what comes out of it.
With that said, Anna, Karena, thank you a lot for doing this, as always.
KA: Thank you.
A: Thank you, Elia.
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