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Overshadowed by COP29, Armenian climate solutions deserve a spotlight
In a grainy colored video from 1995, two men stand on the top of a mountain in Vanadzor, Armenia, their hands buried deep in the soil. The two men are Vladimir Kazadjian and Gagik Amiryan, friends and colleagues of the Lori Branch of the Armenian Red Cross (ARCS) for over 30 years. The men are planting pine seedlings, one of the tree species that was decimated during the energy blockade by Turkey and Azerbaijan from 1992-1995. The energy blockade of the 1990s was not the first time international conflict impacted Armenia’s natural environment, nor would it be the last.
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The COP29 will be a PR show for Azerbaijan, with the environment and climate change as afterthoughts for that dictatorship, when it is a hydrocarbon producer and exporter, a major polluter, its oil fields toxic waste sites, the Caspian Sea used as a sewer, and has overall primitive minimum Soviet-era environmental standarts.
When Pashinyan dropped his objection (he had actually no objection) for Azerbaijan hosting the COP29 conference, I bet he will go to Baku and attend this conference or send his even more inept foreign minister Mirzoyan.
If continuing to appease the Azerbaijani dictator Aliyev was not bad enough, that the Artsakhi leaders continue to languish in Azerbaijani prisons in the very same city where this conference is going to be held, and that Pashinyan is content for them to rot in prison, since he regards them as his political enemies, is revolting. And that other international leaders turn a blind eye and appease the Azerbaijani dictatorship, is equally revolting.
The COP29 will be apart from a PR coup for Azerbaijan, just a useless talking shop, like with so many international environmental conferences before.
Artsakh as a state is gone, yet Azerbaijan still continues its persona non grata list of people who visited Artsakh before 2023, and even continues to keep dead people on this persona non grata list! And anybody of Armenian descent, even non-Armenians who are married to Armenians and carry an Armenian surname, and even non-Armenians who have non-Armenian surnames ending with -yan or -ian, are barred from entering Azerbaijan, even though Azerbaijan’s excuse for barring them, no longer exists!