COP29 (United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference) has wrapped up in Baku, which also means that this event has already been forgotten by the Armenian public. We discussed our missed opportunities in pressurising Azerbaijan at an earlier occasion, and now it is time to discuss the significance of this conference in general and the neglect of the environmental agenda in particular.
On watch for the enemy’s image
Firstly, such ‘mega-events’ are designed to enhance, and in this case, whitewash (or, more accurately, greenwash) the host country’s reputation. Armenia has constantly downplayed this aspect, disregarding all the opportunities that the Armenian Spyurk (overseas communities) could afford to build an image of a successful and rapidly developing nation and to turn it into such in reality. Thus Azerbaijan has grown to be associated with the Formula 1 Grand Prix and the World Chess Cup, whereas Armenia, especially nowadays, stands for poverty and a war danger. Such occasions also offer an excellent opportunity to promote one’s narrative and, as before, the Azerbaijani leadership took full advantage of it, presenting ‘West Azerbaijani’ and ‘Iravan’ cuisine as well as books attributing the heritage of Yerevan to Azerbaijan, on the margins of the conference. If holding such events in the neighbouring country before 2020 or, for the particularly nearsighted, before 2023 may have been considered strategic oversights by Armenia and the Armenian world, then nowadays helping to whitewash its image constitutes an outright complicity in Azerbaijan’s crimes.
We shall recall that this time, it was not Armenia’s political pressure that was required to prevent the event from taking place on the territory of a terrorist country or to boycott it, but merely a single arm stroke. The situation was quite complicated: the conference was to be held in Eastern Europe, and Armenia and Azerbaijan were the only countries that were not vetoed by Russia for supporting Ukraine.
Had the two countries blocked one another, the UN would have been left without a venue to hold the conference 11 months before it was due to take place. Pashinyan played an ‘ingenious’ diplomatic ‘multi-move combination’ that saw 32 Armenian prisoners of war returning home in exchange for Armenian ‘goodwill’ to hold the conference in Baku. Both the ‘electorate’ is content and Aliyev is satisfied. Russia, which has virtually orchestrated this arrangement, is happy, too, as is the collective West, which is fond of ‘mutual’ gestures of goodwill between Armenia and Azerbaijan, especially those coming from Armenia. Everything just the way Nikol Pashinyan likes it. For good measure, a ‘peace treaty’ should have been signed before the Conference, which Pashinyan urged Aliyev to do, being perfectly conscious that such timing would have diverted the attention of the international community from criticising Azerbaijan. Imagine the magnitude of the Azerbaijani mini-sultan’s impudence and sense of impunity, as he didn’t hasten to avail himself of this generous offer, which, as always, would not oblige him to anything, and who chose to further ‘simmer’ and even blackmail his henchman during the Conference instead.
At the same time, as we argued in the previous article, even given the desire of other countries increasingly irritated with Azerbaijan to put pressure on it in such a situation, be it to prevent the Conference from taking place, to completely boycott it, or to press for visits to Armenian prisoners, there was little point in doing so while Armenia was positioning itself in reverse. But if Armenia was nodding to Azerbaijan approvingly, what has the Spyurk with its enormous media potential done? We are the ones who first invoke tacit acceptance as an acceptable strategy, and then lament that we have no international support, therefore deciding to march to surrender to the enemy.
‘But how on earth could we resist Azerbaijan?’ adherents of ‘Real Armenia’ will ask. Well, Greece and Cyprus contrive to isolate the ‘whole’ powerhouse of the region and NATO’s second army in matters of energy co-operation in the Mediterranean, while a number of Western countries boycotted the 2009 UN Conference on Racism featuring Iran’s president, in solidarity with Israel. In both cases, no one hides behind global implications, the agenda of ‘eternal peace’, and their vulnerability in the face of a ‘strong’ adversary. These countries are uncurious whether the ‘international community’ will ‘like’ their resolve. All that matters is their red lines, their own respect for them, and their determination to demand the same of everyone else.
Now we can indulge ourselves that Azerbaijan showed complete incompetence in moderating complex global discussions, that dozens of media outlets criticised the conduct of the conference in Baku, and that Aliyev found himself surrounded by eastern dictators and even the Taliban. Yet it doesn’t change the net result. That is, the Armenian world didn’t push for at least one middle-ranked Western politician to miss another coffee break with black caviar tartlets and travel 15 minutes to the prison where Armenian hostages are being unlawfully detained instead.
Self-destruction
The current Armenian leadership is of course keen on big events too, so it does not sit idly and ‘learns’ from its role model, yet as usual confusing the cause and effect. So in this case, too, it has drawn the most superficial lesson from the mistake of the ‘exes’, who did not excel in holding global events either. Now, mimicking Ilham Aliyev, Pashinyan fancies Armenia a ‘petrostate’. He has turned the country into a vast open-air concert venue at public expense, lavishes rents on the regime’s guards, abuses the environment and erects ‘skyscrapers’ paving the way for the destruction of unique historical and natural monuments. Pashinyan and his minions are certain that all this unpunished and tasteless mockery of all things Armenian was previously hindered by the image of Armenia as an ‘aggressor’. As one sees, the genuine aggressor was only aided by the new territories.
The ecology itself is another critical component of this account. Owing to holding the conference in Azerbaijan, Armenia was effectively excluded from global discussions on one of the core issues of its own survival. It is well known that clean drinking water is a precious resource that will get increasingly scarce, and water resources are henceforth among primary targets of any territorial conflict. However, there are also other essential components of national security of any state. Deteriorating air quality and dependence on energy resources and their prices undermine longevity and quality of life, reduce the effectiveness of public health care, and complicate long-term visioning for the nation’s future. In other words, these problems are an even more ‘reliable’ way to destroy a nation and state than is war. The failure to eliminate them along with the eradication of the Armenian ethnos in the remnants of its habitat is a direct path to ‘zero emissions’, which Aliyev has already attained in Artsakh by uprooting its entire indigenous population.
These kind of challenges are, by the way, on the bottom of the list in Armenia’s current national security ‘strategy’. Meanwhile, similar to other, more acute threats to the existence of Armenia and the Armenian world, they require an urgent and meaningful response, as well as tangible steps to prevent their aggravation and eradicate the damage already caused. The best the Nikol Pashinyan administration managed to do was to promise to plant 10 million trees, ignoring the advice of relevant experts, and eventually drop the target to 1 million and declare that even those – what a surprise – are having a hard time taking root. And all this parallels the genuine ecocide in Yerevan, where old, sturdy trees, which ensure coolness and protection from dust and ultraviolet rays, are slaughtered on the pretext of disease, to be replaced by decorative and fragile trees like sakura.
Sorely evocative of their politics towards our history and identity, isn’t it? And all these self-made mistakes – both those accumulated over decades and the ones the current government could have spared – are piled on top of the disproportionate damage that a small economy is suffering while global players, including neighbouring Azerbaijan, are making money increasing the quality of life of their population and generating a margin of safety for coping with the fallout in the future.
Not only are the Armenian authorities actively destroying Armenia’s nature and literally cutting off people’s oxygen, but they have also effectively uprooted the country’s once-developed eco-activism. As it happens, the activists who were on duty defending Amulsar day and night or who actively opposed the exploitation of the gold mine on the current terms so as not to allow an ecological catastrophe in the neighbourhood of Jermuk, as well as the ‘civil society’ as a whole, either gradually fell out of sight under the first ‘Armenian democrat’ who ruled that the mine was not so bad after coming to power, or had already settled down at the trough.
Besides, the new Armenia has new ‘heroes’, too, and those are the taxpayers. That is why Pashinyan came to appreciate both Amulsar and the Zangezur copper and molybdenum combine, where the government has been a large shareholder since 2021. No wonder that the time-servers hasten to reap profits in the very places where tomorrow there might be no Armenian presence by their own fault. The future lies with countries that would be able to overcome environmental challenges, but the leaders of the Third Republic neither were nor are interested in the future. They exploit the Armenian nature as if they were aliens, as if ‘tomorrow’ will not come – for tomorrow they will either not be on the throne, in the country, or in this world at all.
Presently, the only form of environment that the Armenian government is truly protecting is its neighbours in face of Azerbaijan and Turkey, as well as the needs of their inhabitants for clean drinking water and fertile soil. After all, to make perpetual peace with one’s neighbours, one needs those neighbours to last forever. And if this entails laundering their reputation stained with Armenian blood today and helping them get rid of calamitous landfills and polluted water tomorrow, why not make such a gesture of goodwill? In his opening speech at COP29, Ilham Aliyev called oil ‘a gift from God’, which is a sin not to use. Well, then Nikol Pashinyan is the new oil.
