11/11/2024 Azerbaijan (International Christian Concern) — The COP29 climate change conference started today in Azerbaijan, a country known for its recent ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians.
The U.N. conference is underway in the capital city of Baku just 14 months after Azerbaijan started ethnically cleansing the historically Christian territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Delegates from nearly 200 countries, including the U.S., are attending the summit.
In September 2023, the Azerbaijani military launched a lightning offensive in the territory after a nine-month blockade. The offensive caused roughly 120,000 people, nearly the entire population of Nagorno-Karabakh, to flee to neighboring Armenia.
The Armenian people are known as the first “Christian nation,” having converted to Christianity in A.D. 306. Until 2023, Armenians had lived in Nagorno-Karabakh since at least the first century. Today, the territory is virtually devoid of Christians.
Caucus Heritage Watch has reported for months on the Azerbaijani military destroying Armenian churches and cemeteries, while Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism collective, recently released satellite evidence of the “ransacking” of Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, Stepanakert. The driving out of the Armenian population and destruction of ancient and medieval Christian sites has caused human rights advocates to label Azerbaijan’s actions as “ethnic cleansing.”
Despite this and its reputation as a significant environmental polluter, Azerbaijan was given the honor of hosting COP29. This offense was further compounded by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s announcement that the ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh territory would be converted into a “green energy zone.”
Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Convention of America, said in a statement, “Having faced no accountability for its genocidal ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, it is incumbent on world leaders to use the COP29 summit as an opportunity to scrutinize Azerbaijan’s egregious human rights record — and confront efforts by its genocidal regime to greenwash its war crimes and atrocities.”
In August, International Christian Concern (ICC) sent U.S. government officials a
formal sanctions request against Azerbaijan and prisons where Armenian prisoners of war and Christians were allegedly tortured.
ICC filed the sanctions request with the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of the Treasury under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. The requested sanctions — which include freezing assets and banning travel to the United States — would hold Azerbaijan accountable for its egregious human rights violations.
Since 1995, ICC has served the global persecuted church through a three-pronged approach of assistance, advocacy, and awareness. ICC exists to bandage the wounds of persecuted Christians and to build the church in the toughest parts of the world.
