Azerbaijan’s gamble to rebrand a green Nagorno-Karabakh at COP 29

By Stéphanie Fillion

On Sept. 19, 2023, Marut Vanyan was scrolling on social media in his living room in Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh, in the house he’d lived in most of his life, when he suddenly heard shelling outside his window, and the city’s sirens took off.

“After that, we, people there, understood that this is the end for Armenians because they can’t stay under shelling that continues whole day and night,” he said.

Not long after, Vanyan was one of about 100,000 ethnic Armenians who fled the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region after Azerbaijan’s fast offensive to retake the breakaway territory.

Less than a year later, Azerbaijan, an oil-rich South Caucasus country, has injected $3.1 billion into reconstruction projects in the region ravaged by war and destruction — including three near-empty airports. Azerbaijan has encouraged the Azerbaijani population who had left Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1990s to go back, but it is unclear how many of them have done so.

This November, Azerbaijan will host the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference — or COP 29 — in Baku, its capital, and the country has launched a public relations campaign to sell its newly reconquered territory as a green haven. In fact, the government declared the “liberated” territory a “green energy zone” in 2021.

However, for Armenians and many international observers, it may be harder for Azerbaijan to stay on message during the conference.

“I don’t think they’re going to enjoy the international attention as much as they expect,” Alissa de Carbonnel, Europe and Central Asia deputy program director at the International Crisis Group, told Devex.

Just like the United Arab Emirates one year ago, Azerbaijan will be scrutinized by the international community and civil society representatives before and during the conference. The UAE’s biggest controversy was appointing an oil executive as president of COP — which Azerbaijan has also done through its minister of ecology and natural resources and former oil executive — and its poor human rights record. While Azerbaijan may not be as controversial as the previous host, it does have a stained human rights record and observers are already critical of Baku’s approach to COP 29, especially when it comes to Nagorno-Karabakh.

When preparing to host the international climate conference, Azerbaijan has not shied away from inviting countries to invest in the rebuilding of the territory, even if, for some Armenians, there are unresolved issues related to the recent conflict.

“They’re making a big deal about having the Nagorno-Karabakh region come back into their hands,” Sheila Paylan, an international human rights lawyer of Armenian descent, told Devex. “They’re going to make this incredibly beautifully green. If there was an international conference on flowers, I’m sure they would plant flowers all over it. They’ll do anything to greenwash the fact that they ethnically cleanse that region.”

While an Azerbaijani diplomat who spoke to Devex on the condition of anonymity did not deny the country’s intent to use COP 29 to attract investment in its newly reconquered territory, one observer Devex spoke to called Baku’s promotional campaign “distasteful.”

Baku’s strategic geographical and geopolitical position, especially with European countries, makes it difficult for nations to criticize Azerbaijan’s approach to some issues, such as the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, like they’d want to. As another diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, put it, Europe has limited leverage on Azerbaijan, and Baku “feels like things are going their way.”

As Azerbaijan benefits from the war in Ukraine and the crises in the Middle East as a strategic power between East and West and, as one observer put it, as a lesser-of-two-evils energy supplier following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, COP 29 is likely to put Baku on the map for many, for better or worse.

Can COP 29 see an easing of Azerbaijani-Armenian tensions?

Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region in the South Caucasus, has been a source of conflict for centuries. Historically a part of Armenia, it became contested after its incorporation into Azerbaijan by the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Following the USSR’s collapse, ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence, leading to a war with Azerbaijan. Despite a 1994 cease-fire, tensions and sporadic violence persisted, culminating in a conflict in 2020 which led to Azerbaijan reclaiming substantial territory, and a last offensive in September 2023 when over 100,000 ethnic Armenia fled the territory.

COP 29 became intertwined with the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh the moment Azerbaijan announced its bid to host the climate conference. Armenia initially came in the way of Azerbaijan’s bid to host the conference, which could have proved problematic as the decision on what countries get to host it has to be unanimous.

Last December, Armenia announced it would support Azerbaijan’s bid to host the climate conference in November 2024, as part of a broader prisoner exchange deal reached between the two countries, the first agreement of sorts since the end of the offensive in September.

“Part of the reason for lifting the veto, apart from the prisoner exchange, was that the COP was going to create stability and sort of a disincentive to escalate ahead of this big international event,” de Carbonnel said.

As the Azerbaijani diplomat noted, COP 29 was for Baku the first gesture of goodwill Armenia showed toward the country, and a significant moment for the relationship between two nations at war since their independence from the Soviet Union. There has been more rapprochement between the two countries since the December announcement. Armenia’s foreign minister said earlier this month that a peace agreement was in the making.

Yet while some hope COP 29 could open up Azerbaijan to more cooperation with its neighbor, Stefan Meister, head of the Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations, warned people should not overestimate the importance of the conference for Baku, as he believes Azerbaijan “will attack Armenia” if the country “has an opportunity.”

“This is an authoritarian regime that needs a conflict with the neighbor to distract from internal issues,” he said. “I think we are just in a new stage of a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where Azerbaijan is dominating because of this military superiority and the support of Turkey they have.”

There are important, ongoing issues the two countries still need to address, such as disputed territories and a road that Azerbaijan wants to build that would link its mainland to an enclave inside Armenia, which would also open up a commercial road with Turkey. Azerbaijan calls the road the Zangezur corridor, an extension of newly reconquered territories it calls East Zangezur, another investment hub for Azerbaijan.

“The regions of Karabakh and Eastern Zangezur will become one of the most beautiful places not only in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus, but also of the whole world – the most modern, the most comfortable and the most beautiful,” Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev said last month.

Armenia and Azerbaijan still have to agree on the parameters of the formal corridor — and given that in 2021, Aliyev said “We will implement the Zangezur corridor, whether Armenia wants it or not,” this will be no easy task. In addition, both countries have launched judicial procedures at the International Court of Justice accusing each other of ethnic cleansing over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Cases are ongoing.

“The Karabakh and East Zangezur Economic Regions, which the Government of Azerbaijan has committed to making a ‘net-zero emission zone’ (see also Azerbaijan’s revised NDC (October 2023), are internationally recognized territories of Azerbaijan,” the U.N. resident coordinator in Azerbaijan, Vladanka Andreeva, told Devex in an email.

The COP 29 bureau did not answer several requests for comments from Devex and neither did the foreign affairs ministries of Azerbaijan nor Armenia. In June, a spokesperson for Armenia’s prime minister denied rumors the leader was going to attend COP 29 and it’s still unclear whether or not Armenia will send a delegation.

A strategic player

Azerbaijan, a South Caucasian country, shares borders with Russia and Georgia in the north, and Iran in the south. An oil-rich country, which Aliyev called a “gift from God,” Azerbaijan has been a strategic partner to Europe when it comes to natural resources, especially following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Baku has a long and complicated relationship with Europe, mostly based on commercial interdependence on natural resources, with little in common politically. Azerbaijan also came as an alternative provider of gas for Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The demand has become so high that Azerbaijan has to look outward to fulfill it.

“That’s the ridiculous part,” Meister said, “I think they now want to double until 2027 their gas supply for the EU, but they don’t have the gas, so they are getting Russian gas [to sell to the EU].”

With the international community distracted by crises in Ukraine and Gaza, defending international humanitarian law for Armenians has become a low priority for many countries, to Baku’s benefit.

“The attention span, given everything else that’s going on in the world, there’s a certain sense of like, well, the refugees are fine,” human rights lawyer Paylan said. “They’re safe now. So let’s move on. But legally, it’s not correct. Morally, it’s not correct.”

Hosting COP 29 could be a double-edged sword for Azerbaijan, and only time will tell if Baku comes out of it a winner. Expectations are high for the next climate meeting to deliver on climate finance, advance the loss and damage fund for low- and middle-income countries affected by climate-related disasters, and the development of new nationally determined contributions, and ways to implement them. Azerbaijan’s ambivalence between its commitment to green energy and selling its “god-given” oil could also paint a more complicated picture of the event, as well as Baku’s potential spin in Nagorno-Karabakh, de Carbonnel said.

“It’s hard to spin a positive story around Nagorno-Karabakh for an international audience,” she said. “But it’s going to be impossible for it not to look like a consolidation of gains and victory and international standing, to have world leaders descending on Baku.”

Last November, the International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to let ethnic Armenians go back to Nagorno-Karabakh. The government of Azerbaijan has created an online portal for Karabakh Armenians willing to return and obtain Azerbaijani citizenship, which “can be seen as a step toward facilitating informed and voluntary return,” according to the U.N.’s Andreeva.

Vanyan now lives near Yerevan, Armenia’s capital city. While he would love, one day, to be able to go back to his native Karabakh, he also remains pragmatic about his desire.

“Everyone wants to return back to their home,” he said. “If you ask any Armenian, they’re dreaming of going back and but even if they managed to go there, no one wants to live under the Azerbaijani flag.”