The UK government faces criticism after officials appeared to urge British businesses to help rebuild disputed areas of Azerbaijan just weeks after the state’s military takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh led more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee the region.
Officials from the UK Foreign Office and the business department held an online meeting with British business leaders in November to encourage companies to take advantage of the “great opportunity” to support Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev’s rebuilding agenda.
The event, hosted by a business development network, was held six weeks after the Azerbaijan state seized the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, resulting in an estimated 120,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing the region and crossing into neighbouring Armenia.
The latest territorial dispute, which follows decades of conflict in the region, led Armenians to accuse Azerbaijan of “ethnic cleansing”, a claim Azerbaijan has denied.
In the days after Baku’s military operations the UK government publicly condemned the Aliyev regime’s “unacceptable use of force” in Nagorno-Karabakh and warned that it had “put at risk efforts to find a lasting peaceful settlement” in the region.
But a recording of the online meeting, shared with the Guardian by campaigners at Global Witness, includes one senior UK government official encouraging business leaders to take advantage of the financial opportunities in the “huge western chunk of the country that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up”.
“The Azerbaijan government is supporting what it calls ‘the great return’, which is essentially providing the opportunity for the 700,000 [internally displaced people], these refugees, to basically return to Karabakh. So you have this great opportunity here actually,” the official said.
It is not clear whether the official was referring to Nagorno-Karabakh specifically, part of the far larger Karabakh region. Aliyev set out plans in 2020 to rebuild the “liberated districts” of the Karabakh region in western Azerbaijan, which includes Nagorno-Karabakh. The president said it was important that all displaced Azerbaijan citizens return to Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent districts where they used to live.
A second government official told business leaders: “[There’s] a great opportunity here actually. [It was] just an empty land that was ready to be built over from scratch.”
Jonathan Noronha-Gant, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said: “Behind closed doors, the UK government is calling Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh a ‘great opportunity’. What century are these officials living in? It’s not a great opportunity for the UK, nor for the people who were displaced.”
In the recording the first official said UK companies were “well-placed” to collaborate with the Azerbaijan government to provide infrastructure advice to “a government which has financial means given that it has very large energy resources”. Azerbaijan owns one of the world’s largest gasfields, Shah Deniz in the Caspian Sea, and is a growing exporter of gas to Europe.
The official also said there was a “real opportunity here, both politically to make peace [and] to create a situation where those people who have left from both sides of the line can return, but also economic opportunities within the country itself”.
A UK government spokesperson said: “These comments from UK officials have been misrepresented. Discussions of reconstruction referred to the UK government’s public work to assist with possible future development in the new towns being built for those displaced by decades of conflict.
“The UK is not involved in commercial activity or reconstruction efforts in the area of Nagorno-Karabakh region recovered by Azerbaijan through its September 2023 military operation.
“The UK continues to work to support stability and lasting peace after the long-running conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.”
The Guardian revealed last year that Azerbaijan’s share of two large oil and gas projects operated by British oil company BP had earned its government almost $35bn (£28.6bn), or more than four times its military spending since 2020 when war broke out in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
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 also plans to build a 240MW solar farm in Azerbaijan’s “liberated lands”, according to Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister. The Azerbaijani prime minister, Ali Asadov, met with the BP head of production, Gordon Birrell, recently to discuss the Sunrise solar project, which is planned for an area near the ghost city of Jabrayil, which was left in ruin after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
“This is a great opportunity for BP to cosy up closer still to the Azeri ‘dictatorship’, nothing more,” Noronha-Gant said.
Global Witness has warned BP that its investment has indirectly helped to fund Azerbaijan’s military aggression against ethnic Armenians in the contested region. BP has previously said that it supports “a peaceful settlement to the conflict and hope[s] that a final resolution will soon be found”. A spokesperson declined to comment on the UK officials’ video meeting, or on its plans to build the Sunrise solar project.