Author: Lara Chatinian

BP’s fossil fuel projects in Azerbaijan have helped fund the military aggression against Karabakh Armenians though the transfer to billions of dollars to the Azerbaijan government since 2020, a campaign group has claimed.

Global Witness said Azerbaijan’s share of two large oil and gas projects operated by the British oil company had earned its government more than four times its military spending since 2020, the year that war broke out in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Analysis by the NGO suggested that Azerbaijan’s economic reliance on BP, its largest foreign investor, had indirectly helped to fund Azerbaijan’s military aggression against ethnic Armenians in the contested region, which has forced more than 100,000 people to flee the territory since early September.

In the same month senior figures representing BP, including its chair, Helge Lund, and former chief executive John Browne, visited Baku to attend the 100th birthday celebrations of Azerbaijan’s late former president Heydar Aliyev and reiterate its commitment “to long-term partnership with Azerbaijan”, according to a company statement.

BP has supplied Baku with oil and gas worth almost $35bn (£28.6bn) since 2020 under a “production-sharing agreement”.

Aliyev’s son, Ilham Aliyev, became president after his father’s death in 2003 after an election that observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe claim fell short of international standards.

Dominic Eagleton, senior campaigner at Global Witness, said: “BP’s longstanding partnership with the Aliyev ‘dictatorship’ has funded Azerbaijan’s militarisation and aggression against Armenia. BP has been happy to keep drilling, having learned nothing from the historic mistake it made in Russia.”

BP abandoned a stake of almost 20% in the Russian oil company Rosneft, at a cost of $24bn to the company, following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine after the UK government expressed concerns over BP’s links to the company given its role in providing fuel for Russia’s military effort.

“Funding violent dictators is always a bad strategy,” Eagleton said.

BP last week posted weaker than expected profits of $3.3bn for the third quarter, compared with $8.2bn in the same months last year, prompting speculation that its sluggish share price and boardroom upheaval could make it a takeover target.

A spokesperson for BP said the company has “been present in Azerbaijan for three decades and we remain committed to operating a safe, reliable, and resilient energy business in the region”.

Under an agreement struck between BP and the Azerbaijan government in the 1990s, the oil company is required to hand a share of the fossil fuels it produces from these projects to the state.

This type of arrangement is commonplace in the oil and gas industry as a way to share the risk and reward of developing fossil fuel projects between foreign companies and the host state.

BP holds the largest share of Azerbaijan’s oil and gas projects alongside other foreign oil companies, including the US firm Exxon Mobil, Norway’s Equinor and the Russian company Lukoil, which hold small minority stakes in the projects.

BP’s financial disclosures show it has supplied Baku with oil and gas worth almost $35bn on the global market since 2020. This sum is more than four times the government’s military spending over the same period, which reached $7.9bn, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

“We support a peaceful settlement to the conflict and hope that a final resolution will soon be found,” the BP spokesperson added. Browne did not respond to requests for comment.

Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has alleged the ethnic Armenian exodus amounted to “a direct act of an ethnic cleansing and depriving people of their motherland”. The claim was strongly rejected by Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry, which said that the mass migration by the region’s residents was a “personal and individual decision and has nothing to do with forced relocation”.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/08/bp-projects-have-helped-fund-azerbaijan-military-aggession-say-campaigners

Just days before Azerbaijan wiped the indigenous Armenian enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh off the map, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Yuri Kim declared to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “We will not tolerate any attack on the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.”

The genocidal intent was clear. Azerbaijani soldiers wore armbands with the image of Enver Pasha, mastermind of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, and the slogan “Don’t run Armenian you’ll just die of exhaustion!” Upon capturing Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh and a city historically almost entirely Armenian, the Azerbaijani government named a street for Enver Pasha. To Armenians, Azerbaijan’s arrest of the region’s Armenian political leaders has obvious parallels to the 1915 arrests—and subsequent executions—of prominent Armenian leaders, an event that scholars say marked the beginning of the Armenian genocide.

While growing numbers of Congressmen complain or sign letters demanding action, the Biden administration does little to help displaced Armenians or punish Azerbaijan for systematically violating every diplomatic agreement and ceasefire they signed. While realists in the White House view Armenia-Azerbaijan in isolation and may even see opportunity in the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to enable an elusive peace, they are wrong on both counts. Unilateral action justifies unilateral reaction, even if delayed by decades, while ethnic cleansing unpunished signals its utility to aggressors.

So it is now with Turkey. On October 1, 2023, two suicide bombers affiliated with a militant offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) attacked the front gate of Turkey’s interior ministry, injuring two Turkish soldiers. While there is no excuse for terrorism, the attack came after a year of near daily Turkish cross-border attacks on Kurds. The Turkish Interior Ministry responded by declaring all sites it associates with the PKK and YPG (People’s Defense Units) as well as energy infrastructure as potential targets. Turkish drones and/or aircraft have preceded to bomb a number of sites across northern Iraq and Syria. The threat to bomb civilian and economic infrastructure represents collective punishment illegal under international law.

Given the US partnership with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), of which the YPG is a member, that raises the stakes that Turkey might target American troops. This is not a theoretical problem. On April 7, 2023, Turkish drones targeted a convoy conveying Iraqi Kurds, SDF, and American Special Forces. The strike was not simply a warning, but lethal in intent. Local officials told me the only reason Americans did not die was that the ground was muddier than usual, allowing the warhead to penetrate into the ground before detonating.  On October 5, American forces in Syria downed a Turkish drone that they deemed a threat. Such NATO on NATO action is a rarity.

The Turkish government might seek to compel the United States to abandon their Syrian Kurdish allies, much as the White House abandoned Armenians. That the United States has been silent regarding the Turkish ethnic cleansing of Afrin might encourage Ankara further. That President Donald Trump had after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed willingness to throw the Kurds under the bus might lead Erdogan to believe American resolve is weak.

He would be foolish to believe so. The United States allied with Syrian Kurds against the Islamic State that Turkey at the time backed. Turkey might be a NATO member, but Kurds have proven themselves on the ground at a time Turkey would not. The Islamic State remains a threat, one that would grow if Turkey overruns the Kurdish administration. Erdogan’s racist hatred of the Kurds also ignores the obvious to those who have visited the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria: while far from perfect, it is nonetheless impressive and has achieved a great deal with few resources. Residents—both Kurdish, Arab, and other—enjoy greater freedoms than their counterparts do in Syria, Turkey, or in areas of Iraqi Kurdistan under the control of the Barzani family.

This will not keep Turkey from trying, however. As Turkey seeks to ethnically cleanse northern Syria, Kurds tell me that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps demands the same right of access and operation along its border. Serbia, meanwhile, uses the Azerbaijan and Turkey precedent to intimidate and target Kosovo. Turkey may hope American forces simply get out of the way, but they should not. Today’s downing of a Turkish drone should be both a shot across the bow and an inspiration for the future. To stop ethnic cleansing, it behooves the United States to help all of its allies defend themselves from the predation of dictatorships wielding drones.

Conversely, American troops across the globe will be in danger unless the White House forcefully conveys to those who would seek to target and intimidate them that to do so will lead to an exponentially higher price visited upon them. Washington should put Ankara on notice: If a Turkish drone, jet, or sniper targets an American, every Turk in Syria and Iraq will have a target on their back.

Now a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Dr. Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics, including “Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?” (AEI Press, 2019); “Kurdistan Rising” (AEI Press, 2016); “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter Books, 2014); and “Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos” (Palgrave, 2005).