By Joey Fox
WASHINGTON (New Jersey Globe) — When Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) attended the COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan last weekend, he knew he might be in for a bit of a rough time; the congressman, a co-chairman of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues, has been extremely critical of Azerbaijan’s repressive government and its conflict with Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. But the sheer degree of hostility he faced still surprised him.
According to Pallone, he was confronted several times during his stay in Baku by legions of aggressive journalists — whom he said were plants from the Azerbaijani government — and other protesters with an apparent intention to assault him.
“When you arrive at the conference, as I did, and there are 20 to 30 seemingly reporters who are calling you names and synchronizing what they say with their iPhones — they all said the same thing, it was all on their iPhones — and then start gesturing towards what I thought was going to be an assault on me, you know that this is orchestrated by the government,” Pallone said, referencing an incident that was caught on video outside the conference.
“Then we went back to the hotel, and at the hotel, it was just protestors — thugs, in my opinion,” he continued. “It was clear that they wanted to assault me. There was no question. If it wasn’t for the fact that the security that the embassy hired protected me, I would have been in the hospital. It was serious.”
Pallone and Sen. Ed Markey, who held a press conference yesterday about the incidents, led a letter last month calling on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to use COP29 as an opportunity to promote peace and human rights in Azerbaijan and Armenia.
