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2023-10-24 Africa North
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'France should be ashamed.' Aliyev harshly criticized Macron
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Kamran Hasanov
[REGNUM] Recently, an international conference “Neocolonialism: Violation of Human Rights and Injustice” was held in Baku. In his address to the participants, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev harshly criticized France. The accusations come in several directions, and most of them relate to the colonial period. Paris is accused of several counts at once. The President of Azerbaijan blamed France for geopolitical intrigues and abuse of a permanent seat in the UN Security Council; crimes against humanity; murder of 1.5 million Algerians; theft of wealth from third world countries; conducting 200 nuclear tests in French Polynesia, 17 in Algeria; racism and Islamophobia in modern France. According to the Azerbaijani president, the fight against colonialism is not over yet. Its consequences are still evident today. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, Djibouti, Nigeria, Chad, Senegal, Vietnam, Comoros, Haiti, the peoples of Polynesia are still feeling the consequences of French colonization, including the results of nuclear tests.
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“France, which should be ashamed of its colonial history, rich in bloody crimes, instead of apologizing for the atrocities committed, talks about fictitious ethnic cleansing in other countries,” Aliyev noted.
In general, holding a conference with the participation of the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement seems quite workable. After all, Baku is one of its participants and leaders.
However, the entire focus of Aliyev’s speech is on France, and not on Great Britain, Belgium and other European colonial ex-empires, which are also responsible for many atrocities and crimes. Belgium, for example, is still responsible for a major genocide that killed between half a million and 1 million members of the Tutsi ethnic group in its former colony of Rwanda.
What caused Aliyev's rage? Was France really only guilty of owning colonies? Not really.
The attacks on Paris are justified primarily by the policy that this country has been pursuing against Baku for at least 30 years. According to various estimates, about 350-500 thousand Armenians live in France. The Armenian diaspora has constantly worked to ensure that Paris defends the interests of Armenia on international platforms. France has the right of veto and initiative in the UN Security Council, and until recently it was considered a permanent member of the OSCE Minsk Group along with Russia and the United States.
Before the 44-day war, the French did not have to sweat much for their allies in the region. After all, Armenia was a victorious country. Karabakh and seven regions around were controlled by Armenians.
Everything changed on September 27, 2020. When Aliyev launched an operation against Karabakh, Paris sided with the Armenians. At the Security Council, the French representative insisted on a ceasefire. However, the corresponding resolution was blocked by Great Britain, with which Azerbaijan has special relations due to the participation of British oil workers (BP) in the development of Caspian fields and the transportation of hydrocarbons through Turkey to Europe (TANAP).
In the OSCE format, France also tried to call for a stop to the bloodshed. On October 5, together with the United States and Russia, it was able to agree on a corresponding statement. However, Paris's actions did not produce results.
The Azerbaijani army advanced and was able to occupy four regions around the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Okrug and part of the regions inside it - Hadrut, Shusha, etc. The most offensive thing for the ambitious French President Emmanuel Macron was that in the end a truce came, but bypassing the Elysee Palace.
The final peace was established by Russia in coordination with Turkey. On November 9–10, 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin , Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a tripartite declaration to end the war.
The same statement contained a number of points (the Lachin corridor, unblocking transport routes, the withdrawal of the Armenian military from Karabakh and the return of three more regions to Azerbaijan), which de facto turned the document into a prototype of a peace agreement. In parallel, Russia and Türkiye created a monitoring center in Agdam. Both there and there there is no France, but there is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hated by Macron , and a geopolitical enemy in Ukraine - Putin.
Macron’s conflict with Erdogan went even further than with Putin. Erdogan accused Macron of Islamophobia, “brain cancer,” and Paris was furious because the Turkish military threw France out of Libya and pushed their allies in Greece and Cyprus away from gas fields. The defeat of Armenia meant the defeat of France in the South Caucasus. The only instrument of geopolitical influence represented by the OSCE Minsk Group turned out to be “dead,” as Aliyev put it. And it is true.
France did not calm down on this. At first she took the path of exacerbation.
On November 25, 2020, that is, immediately after the 44-day war, the French Senate recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as an independent state. Macron disowned this initiative, but Baku remembered it.
November 10, 2020. Azerbaijan. Local residents celebrate the end of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. After signing the declaration to end the war
Later, the Frenchman tried to reach out through diplomacy. In the fall of 2022, he organized a meeting between Aliyev and Pashinyan in Prague. Erdogan was also invited there. The negotiations became breakthrough, because it was then that Pashinyan first recognized the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, or de facto Karabakh as Azerbaijani.
Along the way, Macron tried to push Russia aside, accusing it of escalating the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Aliyev did not appreciate this “compliment”. In further negotiations with Pashinyan, he set a condition - that Macron should not be present.
Despite Paris's efforts to integrate into peacekeeping, its chances became less and less. Aliyev accepted only the mediation of Brussels, where the voice of France was leveled by the other three dozen EU countries.
French politicians continued to irritate Baku. They did not forget not only the Senate resolution, but also the trips of French presidential candidates to Armenia and Karabakh, in particular, the head of the province of Ile-de-France Valerie Pecresse, accompanied by Senator Bruno Retaillo and the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, former European Commissioner Michel Barnier.
When the Azerbaijani military took control of the Lachin corridor, official Paris accused Azerbaijan of “blockade of Karabakh.” The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo , traveled to Armenia and took part in sending humanitarian aid to Karabakh. She called the restriction of entry by Azerbaijani border guards “genocide.”
The final chord of France’s anti-Azerbaijani course was the latest “counter-terrorist operation” in Karabakh.
On September 19, Paris demanded to convene an emergency meeting of the Security Council and condemn the military operation of Azerbaijan “with the use of heavy weapons.” On September 21, when everything was already completed and the Azerbaijani Armed Forces took control of the region, Macron limited himself to a telephone call to Aliyev and asked him to provide guarantees for the security of the Armenians.
But this step only worsened the situation for France. The Europeans have scheduled negotiations in Granada between Pashinyan and Aliyev for October 5 to finalize the peaceful disengagement. However, Aliyev refused to go there because of Macron’s presence there.
The above describes only the actions of the Macron administration and politicians during his reign.
Before this, the French authorities also pursued a pro-Armenian line, but it manifested itself much more clearly in the last three years - at the time of the escalation of the conflict. The support is connected not only with the fact that Armenia began to lose, but also with political changes in Yerevan.
Until 2018, Yerevan’s alliance with Moscow seemed unshakable, but after the start of Pashinyan’s premiership, Armenia began to drift towards the West. Although Karabakh is lost for Armenia, France continues to support it. News that Armenia may receive French air defense systems appears in unison with Pashinyan’s accusations of Moscow’s “unreliability” and Russia’s negative role in the South Caucasus. Sometimes it seems that the speeches of Macron and Pashinyan come from the same pen.
Criticism of France by Russia and Azerbaijan pursues different goals. The Kremlin is irritated by the supply of weapons and money to Kyiv, Aliyev by Paris’ support for Armenian separatism. However, both Putin and Aliyev ultimately hit the same target. Now Aliyev is reproducing anti-colonial rhetoric, which sounds more and more clearly in Putin’s latest speeches. Although the Kremlin, of course, not limiting itself to France, criticizes the neocolonial policies of the United States and Great Britain.
One way or another, the geopolitics of the South Caucasus after 2020 is being built in a new way. Pashinyan is already eager to join the European Union, making one anti-Russian attack after another, and Aliyev, trying to maintain a multi-vector policy, still cannot get along with one of the leaders of the EU and NATO. We will see what these diametrically opposed movements will lead to. But the quarrel between Baku and Paris, from the point of view of Moscow’s interests, partially compensates for Yerevan’s drift into the EU.
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Posted by badanov 2023-10-24 00:00||
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Posted by Grom the Reflective 2023-10-24 02:37||
2023-10-24 02:37||
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