End of Armenian Karabakh, return of ecology issues to Rousse and Giurgiu, and the Turów mine story
Autumn of 2023 turned out to be the last autumn of the non-recognised Artsakh Republic - when we write these words, no more ethnic Armenians stayed within its borders after the new escalation waged by Azerbaijan. Fear of revenge was stronger than any trust in Baku’s claims that Azerbaijan wants to reintegrate the region, respecting all nationalities. Cross-Border Talks’ Veronika Susova-Salminen explained the international geopolitical context of the fall of Artsakh. As she points out, “good relations between Moscow and Baku have complicated the overall situation for Karabakh. On the one hand, Azerbaijan has diversified its foreign policy, but not at the cost of a sharp deterioration in relations with Russia. On the contrary. Aliyev’s government has pursued a constructive policy towards Russia and has not been seduced into an anti-Russian trend as part of building a new national identity. Another factor was the special relationship between Azerbaijan and Turkey, which engaged in the Karabakh conflict on behalf of its ally”.
In an interview with Francesco Trupia, Poland-based political scientist, we introduce yet another perspective: how the Karabakh issue was decided over the heads of people living there.
“The conflict and the resolution of the latter has been completely hijacked by the toxic leaderships of the Karabakh clan in Armenia and the President Aliyev and his people in power in Azerbaijan. In doing that, we have seen how the agency of Armenians from Karabakh and of Karabakh has been completely destroyed. Imagine that in the peace fight agreement of 1994, the document was mentioning the de facto institutions of Armenians. Since then, the strategy of Azerbaijan was always to attack Armenia and always to refer to Armenia by ignoring on purpose the fact that there was an agency, a local agency of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Nowadays the rhetoric of Azerbaijan and its institutions is that there is no Nagorno-Karabakh at all, which means denial of what happened and who was living there”
While the Polish electoral campaign enters its final phase, migration issues are being discussed again - but not in a way that Law and Justice had used them in previous electoral races. A huge scandal concerning how Polish visas were issued in states like India, Bangladesh or Nigeria became one of the hot topics. There was a lucrative business going on in the Foreign Ministry, and those who profited the most would probably go unpunished. Wojciech Albert Łobodziński comments.
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More than 30 years ago, the Bulgarian city of Rousse was shaken by protests against air pollution caused by a chemical factory from Giurgiu, the Romanian city located on the other side of the Danube. In 2023, an incinerator is planned to appear in this very same location where the polluting factory worked until 1992. How big is resistance to the project and could Bulgarians and Romanians rally together in defense of the environment? Vladimir Mitev explains.
Two years ago, all Europe followed events in another cross-border area, also concerning ecology and industry. While the Polish-Czech debate on Turów opencast mine and its impact on borderland areas seems to have calmed off, there are still many questions unanswered concerning the future of regions involved. In a multi-part report supported by Journalist Fund, Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat and Veronika Susova-Salminen tell the story of Turów - how the mine grew, being a pride of socialist Poland, how the water question was left to be resolved later, and how a just and green transformation of the region still remains a dream rather than something that is carefully planned and put into practice. So far, three chapters of the story were published and more are to follow.
Read Chapter Two on the beginnings of Turów after WW2 and the formation of this very particular local community.
Read Chapter Three on how an electric plant was built next to the opencast mine - as one of the flag industry projects of Poland’s Socialist economy.
This report was published thanks to support from JournalistFund.