We have failed to stop the worst. The Armenian people of Artsakh, after
a long and brutal year under siege, are now dying of starvation. Rightnow, the Azerbaijani state is committing genocide in Artsakh. ---- TheRussian Federation, Armenia's supposed allies against such anexistential threat, turned their backs on them at their hour of need.The European Union, the self-declared champions of freedom anddemocracy, has enabled Ilham Aliyev's dictatorship in its genocidalquest. And the Left, which loves to pride itself on its smug sense ofself-righteousness, has dismissed or outright ignored Armenians whenthey called for help.Over the past year, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention hasissued no less than 8 alerts about the situation in Artsakh. They sawwhat was coming and were desperate to stop the worst from happening. Butwe didn't listen. Many of us still don't even know it's going on.Our press, whether right-wing tabloids or left-wing broadsheets, havedone nothing to publicise the plight of the Artsakhi people. Ouresteemed representatives in the House of Commons, in all theirposturing, bickering and bluster, have said absolutely fuck all aboutthe situation in Artsakh. Our government, content with squeezing its ownpeople for every last ounce of value they're worth, couldn't care less.Why is that?Yes we can point to the obvious, that news about the Caucasus has neverbeen a priority for the people of Britain. But it goes deeper than that.There's something more sinister beneath the surface of the wide-scalesilence and inaction. There are members of our ruling class that don'tjust support the genocide of Armenians in Artsakh, they're activelyprofiting off it.Conservative Friends of GenocideIn Parliament, there exists a group called the All-Party ParliamentaryGroup for Azerbaijan (APPGA). Their stated goal is "to develop goodrelations between the legislatures and governments of our two countries."This is nothing too out there, parliament is full of groups thatadvocate for good relations with fascistic dictatorships; from Putin'sRussia to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. What is different is how theAPPGA operates, in the shadows and outside of the public eye. Whereasother parliamentary groups diligently report their finances in themonthly reports on their activities, the APPGA has never published asingle statement on its income and expenditure.The extent of the group's corruption has only been discovered throughthe hard work of investigators. The Azerbaijani state has regularlyfinanced all-expenses-paid trips to the country, which have been enjoyedby MPs on both sides of the aisle. As the APPGA has only officiallydeclared one of these trips, we can only speculate just how much moneyhas been funnelled into their pockets.Humanitarian convoy stuck behind the blockadeThe APPGA's dodgy dealings started under its previous chair Mark Field,who was Minister for Asia and the Pacific until he violently assaultedan environmentalist activist in 2019. Before he resigned in disgrace,Field made sure that his work to sanitise the image of a dictatorshipwould only ever be done with the most upstanding of citizens. Of course,Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, was the natural choice for such animportant lobbying job. While facing scrutiny for his association withchild sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Andrew visited his good friendIlham Aliyev no less than a dozen times, in an attempt to increase tradebetween the two countries. Outcry from human rights groups swayedneither the Prince, nor his backers in the APPGA.Despite the name, the only party currently represented in the group'sactivities in the House of Commons is the Conservative Party. Itsofficers include: Matthew Offord, MP for Hendon, and Martin Vickers, MPfor Cleethorpes; while its operations are run by its vice-chair DavidDuguid, MP for Banff and Buchan, and its chair Bob Blackman, MP forHarrow East.The group's leader Bob Blackman isn't unknown when it comes tocorruption, having been discovered to have regularly fudged the numberson his expenses claims. Nor are his apparent fascist sympathies confinedto the Caucasus, as he has publicly associated himself with the Englishfascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Aka: "Tommy Robinson") and the Hindunationalist organisation HFB, supporting their violent rhetoric againstBritish Muslim communities. He has also been one of the loudest andproudest homophobes in the country, having sickeningly advocated for thereintroduction of section 28, after opposing the legalisation of equalmarriage together with his APPGA colleagues Offord and Vickers. It isthen quite logically consistent with his odious ideology that he wouldfind a friend in the corrupt and fascistic regime of Ilham Aliyev andhis cronies.As leader of the APPGA, Blackman has become the most outspoken Britishvoice for Azerbaijani state interests. Over the years, he has receivedtens of thousands of pounds from the Aliyev regime, although he hasnever brought up this conflict of interest in parliament. He has alsoremained a close personal friend and collaborator of the Azerbaijanioligarch Javanshir Feyziyev, sticking with him even as he wasinvestigated for laundering £5.6 million through the UK.Working closely together with his good friends in the Azerbaijani rulingclass, Blackman has knowingly made himself into a sock-puppet for theirpropaganda. When the Azerbaijani regime launched its unprovoked waragainst Armenia in 2020, invading Artsakh and placing its people under adeadly siege, Blackman wasted no time in lobbying the British governmentto support the aggressors. He received "information" on the conflictdirectly from the Azerbaijani embassy, blaming Armenians for the actionsof a state that explicitly desires their elimination.Once Artsakh was safely under the occupation of the Azerbaijani state,Blackman decided it prudent to visit the region, barely containing hisglee as he toured sites of ethnic cleansing. He reported to Liz Truss ofhis desire for the UK to establish a trade deal with the genocidalregime, conveniently failing to mention that his trip had been paid forin full by that very same regime. This was the culmination of years ofcampaigning by the APPGA, in direct collaboration with Feyziyev, tosupport the Azerbaijani state's offensive actions against Artsakh. Hisactions were influential enough that the APPGA doubled in size, ropingin even more corrupt parasites excited by the opportunities of enablingcrimes against humanity.Even outside of the APPGA, there are Tory politicians making money offthe mass murder of Armenians. Bob Stewart, MP for Beckenham, was alreadymaking the rounds for his racist abuse of Bahraini human rights activistSayed Alwadaei. Now he is facing even more trouble, as openDemocracyuncovered that he had failed to declare his role as director ofAzerbaijani weapons company Ksantex SARL, while he was serving on theUK's defence select committee. British oligarch and Tory partymega-donor Javad Marandi has also been discovered to have made dodgydeals with Bob Blackman's good friend, the alleged money launderer andgenocide profiteer Javanshir Feyziyev.There may be even more Tories that are profiting off the Artsakhgenocide, we can only wait and see.Russian "peacekeepers" bravely doing nothing about the blockadeBlood for OilSo the Tories are corrupt and in bed with oligarchs, what else is new?Well nothing is new, that's the problem. The British ruling classes'complicity in the genocide of Armenians, and the corruption of theAzerbaijani regime, goes far deeper than a single political party andmuch further back than a few years.The British exploitation of the Baku oil fields goes back over acentury. When the Shell corporation was founded, it controlled a nearmonopoly over the industry, becoming a key supplier of the British wareffort during World War I. A British force was stationed in Baku toprotect the oil fields from the Ottoman Empire, which by August 1918 wasassaulting the city. By this time, the British were well aware of theatrocities of the Armenian genocide. Nevertheless, when the moment came,they abandoned the city's Armenian population to the Ottoman onslaught.Tens of thousands of Armenians were killed during the September Days. Onthe ruins, the Ottomans established the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.But they were never able to exploit the oil fields they so desired, asthe Ottoman Empire surrendered to the British only weeks later.As though it had shifted with the wind, the British Empire quicklyallied itself with the new Azerbaijani state. In Artsakh, Armeniansformed the self-governing Karabakh Council, but it went unrecognised bythe British, who instead appointed Khosrov bey Sultanov as governor ofKarabakh. With British support, Sultanov set about massacring the nativeArmenians in Ghaibalishen and Shusha, killing thousands.All of this would be for nothing. In 1920, the Red Army invadedAzerbaijan and Armenia, annexing the two back into the Russian Empire;now rechristened as the Soviet Union. Aping the strategy of "divide andconquer", Joseph Stalin awarded Artsakh to the Azerbaijan SovietRepublic. This ensured that should Russian control of the Baku oilfields ever be threatened, war in the Caucasus would be unavoidable.When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the Republic of Artsakhdeclared independence from Azerbaijan, but it would go unrecognised bythe new exploiters of Baku's oil.Since Azerbaijan regained independence from the Soviet Union, thelargest and most direct beneficiary of the Aliyev regime has been theoil giant British Petroleum (BP). While British humanitarian CarolineCox was witnessing the unfolding horrors of the Maraga massacre - duringwhich dozens of Armenian men, women and children were kidnapped,tortured and killed - BP was making a deal with the perpetrators of themassacre in Baku.Empty supermarket in StepanakertArmenia would eventually be victorious in the First Nagorno-KarabakhWar, securing the people of Artsakh a period of respite from attacksagainst their mountainous enclave. But BP and other international oilcompanies came together to ensure that another war was inevitable,funnelling money into the pockets of the Aliyev regime in return forconcessions in the oil fields of the Caspian sea. That oil money wouldgo onto fund the Azerbaijani state's 2016 attack on Artsakh, its 2020conquest and now its ongoing genocidal blockade.These oil companies aren't naive to the consequences of their actions,they just don't care. In fact, over the past few years, they havesecured even bigger and better contracts with the Azerbaijanigovernment. As Armenians die and the world burns, BP and its cohortswill continue to extract oil on shiny new platforms built by blood. BPhas even secured "green energy" contracts in Artsakh itself. Don'texpect to read anything about this in British news though, as BP hasalready paid the BBC £300,000 to whitewash the Aliyev regime's image andreport the "wonders" of Armenian cities bereft of the life of theiroriginal inhabitants.We also can't expect BP to ever willingly pay for the incalculabledamage it has caused. One of BP's biggest political advocates in the UKits one of its own former engineers, APPGA vice-chair David Duguid. Lastyear, Duguid used his position in the government to block movements fora windfall tax on the oil company, conveniently forgetting to declarethat his £50,000 stake in BP may have had an influence on him.As if Brits needed more reasons to despise BP, which has been scalpingus with increasingly high energy prices and encouraging theauthoritarian repression of activists that protest against such socialand environmental devastation. That monthly energy bill is not onlyfeeding the record profits of the UK's powerful fossil fuel oligarchy,it's enabling the mass murder of thousands. When winter comes this year,while Brits may be bankrupting ourselves to pay off the BP mafia,Artsakhis won't have the option of such a luxury. Unless we do somethingright now, they will almost certainly die in the cold.How we stop the worstEvery genocide in history has had its foreign backers and profiteers.Prince Andrew, BP and the Tories of the APPGA should rightfully be seenno differently than the fascist sympathisers, industrialists andaristocrats that supported the Nazis.If we lived in a just society, this kind of bloody corruption wouldn'tbe tolerated for a single moment: MPs like Blackman, Duguid and Stewartwould have been removed from power four times over; Prince Andrew wouldhave been stripped of his royal titles and privileges; and BP would bedissolving while its executives faced retribution for crimes againsthumanity.But we don't live in such a world. Corruption and racism isn't justtolerated by the Tory Party, it's actively encouraged and completelynormalised. Abuse would never be challenged by the House of Windsor,it's their very reason for existing. And no petrochemical company wouldever face consequences for their actions, as they have been profitingoff mass murder since the day they first set oil alight.States and corporations can't solve the problems that they have caused,even if they wanted to. Genocide is the ultimate form of state violenceagainst a people. Once a genocide is ongoing, the only way to stop it isto destroy the state that is perpetrating it and all the mechanisms thatare enabling it. This is the lesson that has been learnt again and againthroughout history.Armenians have already suffered enough from half-measures against theinstitutions that want them eliminated. We are now far beyond the pointof prevention; genocide is already underway, right now. The only optionremaining to save the people of Artsakh is to bring down Ilham Aliyevand his entire wretched regime, along with all the bastards that enabledhim.In Britain, this means we need to intensify the fight against BP; thisis no longer just a question of climate emergencies or financialdifficulty, this is an existential fight for survival. We need tointensify the fight against the Tories, who have abided by thecorruption of their colleagues in the APPGA for far too long. We need tointensify the fight against the monarchy, which has continued to protecta sick old man from the consequences of his actions, whether personal orpolitical.Artsakh's fight is also our fight. If we contihttps://organisemagazine.org.uk/2023/09/08/how-britain-enabled-genocide-international/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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