Azerbaijan’s chief competitor to host the 29th Climate Change Conference was Armenia. Following its ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan seized Armenian hostages, some of which it still holds in violation of a peace agreement the Biden administration pressured Armenia to accept.
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The annual United Nations Climate Change Conference has become for the environment what the Olympics and FIFA World Cup are to sports and Eurovision is to pop music: It is a huge party to showcase and sometimes whitewash the host country.
This year, Azerbaijan will host the 29th Climate Change Conference, also known as COP29 — an irony given both Azerbaijan’s petroleum-based economy and the country’s repression of its own environmental activists upset at pollution in the Caspian Sea.
Azerbaijan may not have bribed to win hosting privileges as Qatar did with the 2022 World Cup, but it extorted.
Azerbaijan may not have bribed to win hosting privileges as Qatar did with the 2022 World Cup, but it extorted. Its chief competitor to host COP29 was Armenia. Following Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, it seized a number of Armenian hostages. The deal was simple: It would release Armenian hostages if Armenia dropped its bid. The Biden administration pressured Armenia to comply, believing that removing the obstacle of prisoners might advance its own efforts to achieve Azerbaijan-Armenia peace.
This was naive. Azerbaijan released some prisoners, but dozens of others continue to languish in Baku’s dungeons, including prominent politicians democratically elected by Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian population to represent them. Nor is peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia on the horizon. Azerbaijan needs an external enemy to deflect attention from its own economic mismanagement, much like rejectionist Arab states used Israel to distract from their own corruption and failings.
The question then becomes how the U.S. should approach a conference where Azerbaijan seeks to launder its image in much the same way Germany approached the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
One option might be to boycott, as President Jimmy Carter did with the 1980 Moscow Olympics so as not to bless a propaganda show after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan just months before. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo goes this route with COP29, announcing that neither she nor many other senior French officials will visit Baku. The Biden team will be hard-pressed to follow suit, though, as its emphasis on fighting climate change will lead it to conclude that sending a delegation to Baku is a necessary evil in pursuit of the greater good that could come from engaging on the environment.
If the Biden administration is creative, however, it can have it both ways. It can use its presence to put Azerbaijan’s dictatorship on the spot and shift the focus to the regime’s abysmal record on human rights.
Azerbaijan has suffered no consequence for Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic cleansing that occurred on President Joe Biden’s watch.
Before COP29 begins in November, Secretary of State Antony Blinken might demand that Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev use the conference to demonstrate normalization with Armenia. He might offer Armenia cohosting duties and lift his blockade to allow visa-free travel between the two neighbors. Creating this precedent would make it harder to restore what amounts to an illegal blockade.
Baku is a lovely city. It has great restaurants, five-star hotels, a beautifully restored old quarter, and a corniche that is the envy of Middle Eastern, if not European, countries. It would be easy for diplomats and delegations to remain in the bubble.
They should not, nor should they partake in any organized outing in which Jews and Christians are trotted out as living museum exhibits. Instead, American officials should use their spare time to visit political prisoners, both Armenian and Azerbaijani, who languish in captivity. These include Vagif Khachatryan, convicted after a deliberate mistranslation by a court translator, and Levon Mnatsakanyan, a former Artsakh defense minister best known for refusing to allow the men under his command to retaliate for Azerbaijani atrocities. Former State Minister Ruben Vardanyan, too, remains in prison for the crime of representing politically the people whom Aliyev subsequently ethnically cleansed.
Team Biden repeatedly says “diplomacy is back” and brags about creative solutions to complex problems. Perhaps T-shirts or wristbands with the faces of hostages could be one creative tactic to convince Azerbaijan that caviar diplomacy will never trump reality.
Azerbaijan has suffered no consequence for Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic cleansing that occurred on President Joe Biden’s watch. This may be Biden’s last chance to rectify wrongs and repair his legacy.
