Cop29 turns heat up on Turkey and Azerbaijan over oil exports to Israel
As delegates gathered to negotiate climate finance and a transition away from fossil fuels at this year’s Cop29 in Azerbaijan, Palestinian and climate advocacy groups are fighting to ensure that Palestine is on the agenda.
In particular, they have placed scrutiny on Azerbaijan and Turkey’s role in supplying Israel with crude oil via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.
The pipeline transports Azerbaijani crude oil to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, supplying Israel with 28 percent of its oil imports at a time when Israel is waging war on Gaza and Lebanon.
The pipeline is majority owned by BP, with Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company Socar the second-largest shareholder.
Three activist groups - Energy Embargo for Palestine, Filistin icin Bin Genc ("1,000 youth for Palestine") and Global Energy Embargo for Palestine - have called on people to protest at Turkish and Azerbaijani embassies, as well as the offices of BP and Socar, during the Cop summit
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“We are identifying multiple pressure points. The first is the Turkish state which represents the final stop in the BTC pipeline where oil is shipped to Israel,” the groups said.
And their call was heeded: on 11 November, protests were staged outside Turkish and Azerbaijani embassies in London, Zurich, Tokyo, Berlin, Dublin and Zagreb, as well as others in Palestine, Jordan and Turkey itself.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg issued a statement supporting the protests, and calling out "Turkey and Azerbaijan's complicity in the violence against Gaza".
At Cop29 in Baku, the Climate Justice Coalition, a coalition of trade unions, NGOs and grassroots campaigns, held a rally and hosted panels linking the issues of climate change and Israel’s war on Gaza.
One Thousand Youth for Palestine, a Turkish group, has driven the scrutiny on Turkey.
“Turkey isn't just a bystander, it's also a significant obstacle to Palestinian liberation. Not just by fuelling genocide by supplying oil, but also essential goods like steel, textiles, and chemicals,” the group's Seyma Altundal told MEE.
Performative solidarity
Turkish relations with Israel have plummeted since the Gaza war began, especially after the local elections in Turkey where the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was punished in part over its weak response to the conflict.
Last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey was cutting all relations with Israel. Israeli President Isaac Herzog even failed to appear in Baku for Cop because Turkey refused to let him use its air space.
'It was very obvious to us that [Turkey's] performative solidarity wasn't going to evolve into an actual, concrete solidarity with Palestine'
- Bala Ersay, One Thousand Youth for Palestine
Yet the activists of One Thousand Youth for Palestine, which formed in January, believe Turkey has not done enough to pressure Israel. The group has targeted Turkish ports and the offices of Socar and BP to protest against ongoing oil shipments from Ceyhan despite Ankara’s imposition of a trade embargo with Israel in May.
“We realised that Turkey was trying to show itself as the defender of Palestine… but it was very obvious to us that this performative solidarity wasn't going to evolve into an actual, concrete solidarity with Palestine,” Bala Ersay, one of the group’s members, told MEE.
Earlier this month, the Turkish energy ministry denied that any oil tankers bound for Israel had left Ceyhan port since Ankara began its trade embargo.
It added that Botas, Turkey’s state oil company, which operates the Turkish section of the pipeline under an agreement, has "no authority or involvement in the purchase or sale of oil" and that "companies transporting oil through the BTC pipeline for export to global markets from the Haydar Aliyev Terminal have respected Turkiye's recent decision not to engage in trade with Israel".
However, Lorne Stockman, the author of a report by advocacy group Oil Change International, which tracked oil shipments to Israel up until July, said that their data sources showed multiple shipments from Ceyhan since May.
“Our data doesn’t show shipments after 28 April, but then we only tracked to 15 July for the report,” Stockman told MEE.
“We reached out to our data sources and they are seeing shipments that are registered as having come from the BTC terminus, which is Ceyhan, and arrived in Ashkelon in September and October and November.”
A Turkish official has previously told MEE that BP sells oil to intermediary companies, which Ankara cannot control, and tankers pick up the oil "without declaring their final destination".
“There’s no real reason to assume that these shipments have stopped. Azerbaijan has a very strong relationship with Israel, it’s the biggest single source of oil for Israel in our data," Stockman said.
Azerbaijan’s oil exports to Israel increased four-fold since the beginning of this year, ballooning from 523,554 tonnes in January to 2,372,248 tonnes in September.
Ceding control
Under a 2000 host government agreement, Turkey is unconditionally bound to ensure the free flow of oil through the pipeline, and would have to pay substantial monetary compensation if Ankara broke it.
“Turkey may not have a huge amount of control,” Stockman told MEE. “For the BTC pipeline to go ahead in the first place, there may have been a certain amount of control that was ceded. There may have been a guarantee made by the countries hosting the pipeline that they would not interfere with it.
“We've had similar questions around some of the African exporters, because some of the African countries that are regular suppliers to Israel have made public statements condemning occupation and Israel's actions, but their oil continues to flow.
"We think maybe that's because the agreements that those governments have made with the companies producing their oil bind them to not interfere.”
However, some have argued that Ankara could halt the flow of oil through Ceyhan using South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ), which Turkey joined in August.
According to Turkish lawyer Yusuf Akseker, while Turkey could be sued by BP or Socar for breaking its agreement, the courts would have to wait for the outcome of the ICJ case.
“Even if the courts do not rule on the crime of genocide, they will determine a crime against humanity, and therefore Turkey will win any possible lawsuit that will be filed,” he said.
Should the ICJ determine Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan could be viewed as violating the duty to prevent genocide by supplying fuel and raw materials to Israel.
Not a separate issue
In Baku, the Climate Justice Coalition is helping raise the profile of the Palestinian cause at Cop29.
“We came here with two priorities,” Asad Rehman, director of aid group War on Want and a member of the Climate Justice Coalition, told MEE.
"One has been our call for rich countries to pay up the public finance needed for debt reparations and climate debt, and the second is to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and offer an end to genocide.”
But, as with previous Cop conferences, calls for Palestinian solidarity are heavily censored.
According to Rehman, during a pro-Palestine protest on 11 November, activists were silenced and banned from putting up images of Palestinian activists that have been killed by Israel.
“The only thing we have been able to do so far is totally silent protests with a fixed number of people,” Rehman said. “And that’s taken a huge amount of organising.”
Azerbaijan, a close Israeli ally, has escalated a crackdown on civil society since Baku was announced as the host of the conference last December. Staging protests outside the conference and engaging with Azerbaijani activists is simply not possible.
According to Azerbaijani human rights defenders, around 300 people remain in detention on politically motivated charges, including climate advocate Anar Mammadli, who has been in pretrial detention since 30 April.
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