Statement on COP29 in Azerbaijan
Ararat Collective, Berlin
This year, the world’s largest “climate conference”, COP, is taking place in Azerbaijan. Judging from the selection of prior hosts and resulting scandals from the conferences, as well as the decision to host this year’s COP in Azerbaijan, a country which exports $33.6 billion USD of oil and gas per year, accounting for over 90% of its total exports, it couldn’t be more apparent that COP is a farce. It is a conference whose aim is to deceive the world community into thinking the world’s influential figures, governments, heads of state, and above all, “green” companies will create a path towards a sustainable future. We believe that there is no path to a sustainable future under “green” capitalism, which is precisely what all these institutions, key players and heads of state wish to foist onto us – the people – as they, the global elite who preside over COP, continue to hoard the vast amounts of wealth, resources and land.
We believe it is impossible to collectively work to save our future without addressing the elephant in the room: the unequal distribution of wealth and resources. When the yearly COP fails to address this glaring issue, one that is directly correlated with the increasing precarity of the world’s peoples and its communities – whether due to starvation, dangerously rising sea levels, or massive crop failures – and instead attempts to sell us, the global public, a slew of toothless “policies”, unenforceable “agreements”, as well as false promises like “the end of fossil fuels”, then we see no reason to take this conference seriously.
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It is this capitalist ethos at the root of COP that has no answer for ending ecological destruction, including that of human life caused by military aggression, as the powerful will invariably bully the less-powerful into giving up control of their resources and lands to further capital-driven extraction, ultimately triggering the destruction of human and non-human life, lands and indigenous cultural heritage, all of which are indispensable to our collective futures.
Armenians saw this dynamic play out in a part of their ancestral home, the region of Artsakh (also referred to as Nagorno-Karabakh). Azerbaijan, reaping the benefits of their lucrative oil & gas business, bought advanced, state-of-the-art weapons and attacked the indigenous Armenians of Artsakh, initiating a 44-day war in September 2020. Militarily overpowered, Armenians lost the war. A few years later, Azerbaijan then put 120,000 Armenians in Artsakh under siege in a blockade with the expressed intent of starving them. After nine months of the blockade, Azerbaijan then carried out a bombing campaign targeting civilian areas to drive out the Armenians from their ancestral home. This ethnic cleansing marked the first time that Artsakh would be deprived of its Armenian community in 2,000 years. What did Azerbaijan and its business partners gain with this colonial act of aggression? More land for mineral exploitation, access to water and other “renewable” energy sources to exploit, as well as a more strategic military position vis-à-vis the Syunik region in the south of the Republic of Armenia, which recently has garnered lots of attention as being the potential linchpin for a major trade route connecting Central Asia to Europe.
It is no coincidence that Azerbaijan is hosting COP at a time when talks to develop a corridor have intensified with major powers descending on the region to stake their claim. It is also not surprising that support for Azerbaijan’s aggression towards Armenians comes from its strategic energy and defense partners – Turkey and Israel – and is facilitated and encouraged by the US, the EU and Russia, all parties with plans for the region based on their own interests and prospects for self-enrichment.
What occurred in Artsakh is emblematic of the kind of world that capitalist “solutions” for a sustainable future will promise us: a world composed of players each vying for resources, wealth and power, with the weak being subjected to more and more exploitation, extraction and dispossession. An illustrative example of a typical capitalist “solution” sold as “sustainable” can be found in Azerbaijan’s “Green Energy Zone” project in Artsakh – rumored to feature prominently at this year’s COP. The hypocrisy of this project is unmistakable. After ethnically cleansing the region and submitting it to massive environmental devastation, Azerbaijan now promises a new era of sustainability in the region by touting “green” initiatives. Such projects should be called out for what they are: a cynical ploy by a dictator of a petro-state to launder his state’s poor reputation of military aggression, environmental destruction and dismal human rights record through greenwashing, all while planning the exploitation of these newly conquered lands for resource extraction and resettlement of new people.
What we stand for is a decolonial ecology, one that provides a real path towards a sustainable future, one that transcends the constraints of capitalism, and one that takes into account inequities and unequal access to resources with respect to the world’s communities. The inability to grasp this as a necessary principle for moving forward will invariably lead us to our collective peril. COP, as a formalized institution within capitalism, cannot have an interest in decolonial ecology. Therefore, any legitimacy bestowed on this conference threatens to obscure the path to sustainability and inadvertently reinforces the logic of capitalism, the mantra of which can be summed up as “extraction by any means possible”.
Our fight against this destructive system is ongoing and we will keep deploying our community-driven action from the ground-up to reject and eventually topple this system. We call on all our comrades to raise their voices against this conference, its capitalist ethos, as well as the fake “green” agenda peddled by Azerbaijan and its partners which undermines the goal of sustainability and shifts the attention away from the real problems and solutions. While we do not limit our struggle to a single event – in this case COP29 – we are aware that Azerbaijan will use its status as host this year to promote its image abroad, further its business interests, and further entrench itself within the leading forces of the global capitalist structure and its power brokers. We, therefore demand, as first steps:
- An end to the occupation of Artsakh and the removal of Azerbaijani forces from within the borders of the Republic of Armenia
- The restoration of all homes, property and belongings to the forcibly displaced population of Artsakh, along with guarantees of security and a sustainable life for those from Artsakh
- The release of domestic political prisoners and Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan
* Ararat Collective was founded during the 44-day Artsakh war in Berlin as an antifascist Collective. Its social media page is https://www.instagram.com/ararat_berlin/, details about the collective are available at: https://www.theleftberlin.com/ararat-collective/․
Armenian Environmental Front (AEF) Civic Initiative
