Armenian Cause gains momentum with the ANC-UK’s first fundraising gala
The United Kingdom is often an overlooked yet key player in the conflict between Armenia, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and Azerbaijan. BP is one of the main partners of SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil and gas company, and the U.K. is the largest foreign investor in Azerbaijan, with over 600 companies operating in the country and investments exceeding $27 billion—representing 51.7% of all foreign investment in Azerbaijan. Moreover, investigations by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project have revealed that a significant portion of President Ilham Aliyev’s wealth is held in London real estate. If any country is capable of exerting real pressure on Azerbaijan, it is the United Kingdom — which is why efforts to advance the Armenian Cause in the U.K. are so important.
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When ANCA and other Armenian organizations face an uphill struggle in the United States, which has the second largest Armenian Diaspora in the world, in the United Kingdom, which has a small Armenian community of only 18,000 in a country of 67 million, which doesn’t recognize the Armenian Genocide, has friendly and deep ties with both Turkey and Azerbaijan, the aforementioned economic relations with both countries, the influential Azerbaijani and Turkish lobbies active in that country even though the Turkish community is fairly small at 300,000 at most and the Azerbaijani community is tiny at 6,000, and is probably the most pro-Turk and pro-Azerbaijan country in Europe after Hungary, the struggle will be like climbing Mount Everest.
You have to start somewhere, because the UK is too important to the Caucasus to ignore. What’s more besides loaning the Anahit statue from the British museum and buying a fancy new embassy in London, the Armenian government has done little to nothing to raise its profile in British government or amongst the British public.
Strong lobbies aren’t created overnight, and they’re certainly not built by doing nothing, nor by repeating the same old tired formulas so many diasporan groups can’t seem to snap out of. All we seem to be able to do is organise protests and whine on social media.