Thank you to Actu.nc for publishing our article in issue no. 524 of their weekly, “Against Azerbaijan's manipulation of New Caledonia's independence struggle”!
You will find the text below:
AGAINST AZERBAIJAN'S MANIPULATION OF NEW CALEDONIA'S INDEPENDENCE STRUGGLE
Diversion, destabilization and influence to change its image in the international public arena: three subterfuges used by Azerbaijan in 2023, when it was guilty of ethnic cleansing of Artsakh (or Nagorno-Karabakh), the ancestral Armenian territory.
If we are speaking out today in these columns, it is not simply to denounce the lies of the Azerbaijani dictatorship, inherited from father to son by Ilham Aliyev. No, it's more a question of revealing the vast manipulation to which certain independence activists in Tahiti, Martinique, Corsica, French Guiana and New Caledonia have fallen victim or are involved.
On July 6, 2023, Azerbaijan, Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement since 2019, launched the creation of the “Baku Initiative Group”. It defines itself as an international organization made up of several independence movements co-opted by Baku, whose aim is to organize meetings with political figures, political parties and associations fighting against French colonialism, as well as to relay and organize events and demonstrations.
The timing is not random: Azerbaijan has been blockading the 120,000 Armenians of Artsakh for almost seven months now, preventing the passage of people, food and medicine, and is preparing an offensive to expel the indigenous Armenian population. The ethnic cleansing will take place in September 2023, when Azerbaijan relaunches its colonial and genocidal war and overthrows the democratic Republic of Artsakh.
France, which has verbally supported Armenia (not least to combat Russian influence there) and is preparing to sell it arms, becomes the ideal target for diversion: pointing the finger at the colonial logic of a third party, while itself pursuing a genocidal policy against the neighboring country. Azerbaijan's aim is also to protect itself against any criticism when it settles its first settlers on Armenian lands.
Azerbaijan not only educates its people through racist programs - for whom “Armenian enemies” are ‘dogs’ - massacres them at every opportunity, and expels them from their ancestral territories, but also sets out to destroy every trace of Armenian historical heritage it finds on the “liberated territories” following the 2020 war.
Between July 2023 and the present day, the Baku Initiative Group organized several conferences in Azerbaijan, Switzerland, the USA and Turkey, attended by activists from several Kanak independence parties, whose names we won't mention here, as it's not our aim to expose them.
The manipulations of Baku's agents were also quite visible: in its communications, the Baku Initiative Group took pleasure in photographing and filming Azerbaijani flags erected on stands, and portraits of Ilham Aliyev brandished by co-opted demonstrators. The strategy was clear: after providing a diversion during the ethnic cleansing, the aim was now to pass Azerbaijan off as an “anti-colonial nation”. The height of hypocrisy, when the criminal nature of Aliyev's regime is made clear.
It should be made clear that this article is not intended to discredit the Kanak anti-colonial movement, whose struggles are similar in many respects to those of the Armenians, nor to be co-opted by any loyalist and/or far-right movement.
What we do want to do is warn: to attend the Groupe d'Initiative de Bakou events and take part in its staging is to be indirectly complicit in the fate of the Armenians of Artsakh, and in the continuation of Azerbaijan's genocidal policy against all Armenians.
