Emmanuel Macron will not attend COP29, despite the great importance of the climate issue for French diplomacy and for his personal image. This is the consequence of a continuous deterioration in relations between Paris and Baku, which has its origin in France’s strong support for Armenia in its territorial conflict with Azerbaijan, and which today gives rise to mutual accusations of interference in internal affairs.
Baku did not like that Paris referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council in September 2022 and began, in October 2023, military cooperation with Armenia. With the delivery of Bastion armored vehicles, three GM200 radars, Mistral 3 anti-aircraft missiles and Caesar self-propelled guns. The objective is to reconstitute a greatly reduced army after the harsh defeat inflicted by Baku in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020.
Ulcerated, the Azerbaijani presidency reacted with a virulent anti-French media campaign with overtones “anticolonialists” intended to stoke resentment towards the metropolises of New Caledonia and the West Indies. This influence project, called the “Baku Initiative Group”, coordinated with the Russian intelligence services, has been offering very clear support for several months to all independence movements in overseas territories and to voices hostile to France in Africa.
Excessive penalty
In December 2023, Azerbaijani justice imprisoned a French businessman, Martin Ryan, accusing him of spying for the benefit of Paris. In 2024, two other Frenchmen, graffiti artist Théo Clerc and businessman Anass Derraz, suffered the wrath of justice in separate cases with political overtones and are currently detained in Azerbaijan. The Quai d’Orsay reacted on September 4 by advising the French not to surrender. “unless there is a compelling reason,” in the country due to “risk of arrest, arbitrary detention and unfair trial”. At the end of September, the Azerbaijani dissident Vidadi Isgandarli was assassinated in Mulhouse (Haut Rhine). His family and friends are convinced that the murder was ordered by President Ilham Aliev’s regime. An investigation is underway.
Suspected of wanting to pressure France through arbitrary arrests, the Azerbaijani authorities claim, for their part, to have tangible elements that support their accusations. In the Martin Ryan case, the country’s internal intelligence services, according to our information, discovered written exchanges on his phone with an agent of the General Directorate of Foreign Security (DGSE) stationed at the French embassy in Baku. For the French secret services, this dialogue did not have a clandestine dimension, because these meetings were carried out by a DGSE agent duly registered with the local authorities, as is the case of the majority of the members of the secret services deployed in the embassies.
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