A day of fast cars and genocidal maniacs in Azerbaijan

Should you be one of those watching the fuel-fest known as the Formula 1 grand prix taking place in Baku today, consider this: within half a mile of the drivers hurtling around the streets of Azerbaijan’s capital is the state security service headquarters. And languishing in its cells are — among many other political prisoners — several who were ministers of the former Armenian government of Nagorno-Karabakh, now unlawfully held hostage after being captured last year when Azerbaijan invaded the disputed territory.

Greg Maffei, head of Liberty Media, which owns the F1 business, has criticised the holding of one of its races there, but said that such events were in “places like Baku” because they had paid such large sums for the privilege — a succinct description of what has become known as “sportswashing”.

But Ilham Aliyev, who took over from his father as the president of Azerbaijan in 2003, and appointed his wife vice-president, is also the latest example of how autocratic petro-states are cloaking themselves in the sanctimony of the fight against climate change. For in November Baku will host Cop29 — the annual UN conference on climate change. Aliyev has the audacity — given his recent actions — to declare it will be “the Cop of peace”. (I can’t quite believe this slogan could have been dreamt up by the British public relations company Teneo, which has the Azerbaijan Cop29 account. Previously another British PR firm, Portland Communications, toiled most remuneratively to put the best possible gloss on the Baku regime.)

The bulk of Azerbaijan’s GDP and approximately 90 per cent of its export revenues are the fruits of oil and gas production. Is this a message that Aliyev wants his country to become a post-hydrocarbon economy? The reverse. At last year’s Cop assembly he declared: “As head of a country rich in fossil fuels, of course we will defend the right of these countries to continue investments and production.” He has also referred to Azerbaijan’s oil and gas reserves as “a gift of the gods”.

A further gift is the business opportunity for Baku to fill the gap left by much of Europe’s abandonment of Russian gas, following Moscow’s assault on Ukraine. When the European parliament approved sanctions against Aliyev and other Azeri government officials over their offensive against the Armenians, the European Commission refused to implement them, and its president, Ursula von der Leyen, flew to Baku, hailing the country as “a crucial energy partner” for the EU in its efforts to reduce reliance on Russian oil and gas.

But it seems Azerbaijan was increasing its own imports of Russian gas, even as it had been stepping up its exports to the EU. One expert in this field, Gubad Ibadoghlu of the London School of Economics, has written that “the only viable way” Azerbaijan could fulfil its new obligations to the EU was to buy in more gas from Moscow (to shove back down the pipelines to Europe). Indeed, the EU’s energy commissioner told Politico magazine that such repackaging of Russian gas would not be against the rules “because Russian gas is not sanctioned”.

One thing clear in this murky business is that President Aliyev and President Putin enjoy the best of relations. The Azeri leader welcomed the Russian to Baku in August, returning the hospitality he had received at the Kremlin four months earlier. This casts light on the fact that Russia, which had long guaranteed Armenia’s borders, did not come to its aid when Azerbaijan invaded last year. Admittedly, Putin had other matters on his plate, what with trying to conquer Ukraine and threatening the West with nuclear annihilation.

To put it mildly, this bodes ill for the Armenians, the first nation to become officially Christian (long before the Roman empire), who have suffered genocide at the hands of Muslim neighbours before.

The term genocide was coined by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, partly in response to the atrocities perpetrated against the Armenian population of the Ottoman empire between 1915 and 1918. Roughly three quarters of the Armenian race were exterminated, a greater proportion than even Hitler managed in respect of Europe’s Jewish population.

The language used was similar. One of the perpetrators, a doctor and regional governor called Dr Mehmed Resid, said “the Armenian bandits were a load of harmful microbes that had afflicted the body of the fatherland. Was it not the duty of the doctor to kill the microbes?”

In this context, Aliyev’s description of ethnic Armenians as “barbarians and vandals” infected by a “virus” for which they “need to be treated” is chilling. As is a commemorative stamp issued by his government, portraying a man in a biohazard suit fumigating the area of Nagorno-Karabakh. Will Baku stop there? In a speech on December 24, 2022, Aliyev declared: “They … established a state for themselves in someone else’s land. Armenia was never present in this region before. Present-day Armenia is our land.”

In fact, “present-day” Armenia, which represents about 10 per cent of the landmass of its historic territory, is a landlocked little country of no strategic significance: it has no oil or gas, for example. Which helps explain why the ever-pragmatic Foreign Office has advised successive British administrations not to provoke Turkey by recognising what it did to the Armenians as genocide (though the US, Germany and France have found the nerve to do so).

Azerbaijan has also been rather more successful at winning the affection of Westminster politicians, not least in the case of Bob Blackman, who has for many years been chairman of the Azerbaijan all-party parliamentary group — and more recently of the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee, now organising the election of a party leader.

In 2020, as Aliyev mounted an earlier attempt to seize Nagorno-Karabakh, Blackman seemed proud to declare that in Westminster he had often “put down positions on behalf of our good friends in Azerbaijan” and that “in these types of conflicts … whoever gets the best propaganda tends to grab the attention of the listeners and viewers”. In this respect, said Blackman, he had been “fed the information through the Azerbaijan embassy in the UK”, which had been “very helpful and proactive”.

Last week, per contra, three other MPs signed a letter to the head of F1 calling on him to “stop enabling regimes like Azerbaijan to sports-wash their crimes”. I fear there is worse to come.