COP29 is exposing Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan as the warmongering autocratic petrostate that it is

Neil Hauer is a Canadian journalist reporting on Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus.

The South Caucasus is not a part of the world accustomed to media attention.

Nestled in the mountains between Russia, Turkey and Iran, the region is quite literally on the margins. Its countries – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – have a combined population of less than 20 million. Even the wars that still regularly take place here struggle to evince more than a glance from most of the world.

The last week has changed that. The COP29 conference, the United Nations’ premier annual climate change summit, has brought an unprecedented level of world attention to the area, with the Republic of Azerbaijan – the progenitor of the wars that have roiled the region for nearly half a decade – playing host.

The climate summit so far has been, to put it mildly, a fiasco. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev set the tone early when he used his opening remarks not to establish a harmonious environment for delicate negotiations but to rip into what he called the “hypocrisy” of the West. He followed that up with targeted remarks against France and the Netherlands on Wednesday, causing the former to boycott the summit and drawing a notable rebuke from the European Commission. Instead of committing to transitioning away from fossil fuels, Mr. Aliyev described them as “a gift from God” and has actually inked more oil and gas deals at the summit.

For observers unfamiliar with modern Azerbaijan or its leader, these developments have been shocking. For those who have closely followed the country, they were par for the course.

Three characteristics define Mr. Aliyev’s Azerbaijan. The first is dictatorship. Since inheriting the presidency from his father in 2003, Mr. Aliyev has steadily crushed all domestic opposition to his rule and rigged every election in his favor. The shambolic nature of his rule was perhaps best demonstrated in 2013 when the results of Azerbaijan’s presidential election were published by state media a day before the vote even took place. Authoritarianism in the country has only worsened in recent years, including a crackdown against some of the country’s last remaining free activists that began just weeks before the start of COP29.

The second trait is a love for oil and gas. Azerbaijan is the definition of a petrostate, with more than 90 per cent of the country’s exports and the vast majority of its state budget coming from the fossil fuels sector. The shores of the Caspian Sea, where the bulk of resource extraction occurs, are so polluted that they have been described as “an ecological armageddon.” And it’s not just local gas: in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the EU largely cutting off purchases of Moscow’s energy, Azerbaijan signed a deal with Russia’s Gazprom to import huge volumes of gas – effectively an agreement to launder Russian gas that is resold to Europe. This is an unsurprising development, given the close and growing partnership between Mr. Aliyev and Vladimir Putin, who declared an alliance just before the 2022 launch of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The third trait is the most destructive: an instinct for war. For the last four years, Azerbaijan has launched military offensives annually, directed at either the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh or neighboring Armenia. In 2020, Mr. Aliyev launched a 44-day war against Nagorno-Karabakh, eschewing long-running diplomacy over the dispute in favor of killing thousands. He then finished the job in September, 2023, expelling more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians in what Freedom House has called “deliberate ethnic cleansing.” There was even a cynical environmental aspect to the act, with the December, 2022, deployment of barely disguised “ecological activists” to starve Nagorno-Karabakh’s population for nine months by blockading their only road link to the outside world.

Mr. Aliyev punctuated these assaults with incursions into Armenia in 2021 and 2022, where his forces still occupy parts of Armenian territory and threaten to advance further. Ethnic hatred against Armenians has been a rallying point of Mr. Aliyev’s regime, which regularly threatens Armenia – whose people he refers to as “slaves” and “dogs” – with another application of his “iron fist.”

As COP29 moves into its final days, there seems to be little hope of reaching crucial new climate agreements amidst its host’s intransigence. The summit’s only positive outcome may be that the world is finally waking up to the fact that Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan is a brutal dictatorship constructed around eternal war, environmental destruction and the silencing of internal opposition. Perhaps, in the wake of this summit, we can confidently list Mr. Aliyev’s Azerbaijan among the ranks of the world’s most brutal regimes: Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus, and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.