By Thalif Deen UNITED NATIONS (IPS) – When more than 130 world leaders arrive in New York for the high-level segment of the General Assembly next week, it will be rare to hear hard-hitting, headline-grabbing political statements from the podium. The speeches before the 193-member General Assembly and UN press briefings that occasionally follow are [...]
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UNITED NATIONS (IPS) – When more than 130 world leaders arrive in New York for the high-level segment of the General Assembly next week, it will be rare to hear hard-hitting, headline-grabbing political statements from the podium.
The speeches before the 193-member General Assembly and UN press briefings that occasionally follow are mostly long-winded and monotonously boring. The exceptions, however, are rare.
When Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi visited the UN in September 2009, a report in the London Guardian said he “grabbed his 15 minutes of fame at the UN building in New York and ran with it. He ran with it so hard he stretched it to an hour and 40 minutes, six times longer than his allotted slot, to the dismay of UN organisers.”
The lighter side of politics at the UN General Assembly
Gaddafi fully lived up to his reputation for eccentricity, bloody-mindedness and extreme verbiage, as he tore up a copy of the UN charter in front of startled delegates, accused the Security Council of being an al-Qaeda like terrorist body, called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be put on trial for the Iraq war, demanded $7.7 trillion in compensation for the ravages of colonialism on Africa, and wondered whether swine flu was a biological weapon created in a military laboratory.
Incidentally, according to one news report, there were 112 different spellings of the Libyan leader’s name, both in English and Arabic, including Muammar el-Qaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi, Muammar al-Gathafi, Muammar El Kadhafi, Moammar el Kazzafi, Moamer, El Qathafi, Mu’Ammar, Gadafi, and Moamar Gaddafi, amongst others.
The Wall Street Journal ran a cartoon making fun of the multiple spellings: a visiting reporter, on a one-on-one interview in Tripoli, telling the Libyan leader, “My editor sent me to find out whether you are Qaddafi, Khaddafi, Gadafi, Qathafi or Kadhafi?”
A memorable Soviet-US confrontation took place at the General Assembly hall in October 1960 during the height of the Cold War, but this time it was between the USSR and the Philippines, considered a close US ally at that time.
The Filipino delegate, Lorenzo Sumulong, lashed out at the USSR, pointing out that “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere (under Soviet domination) have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights, which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union.”
Incensed by the remark, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was leading the Soviet delegation, hit back with a vengeance, describing the Filipino as “a jerk, a stooge, and a lackey” and a “toady of American imperialism” – words that are rarely heard in the General Assembly or the Security Council these days. Forget the North Korean refrain: “Running Dogs of Imperialism”.
The British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who was at the podium, jokingly responded to the Soviet leader’s angry outbursts when he hit the podium with his shoes by famously asking the Speaker, “I should like that to be translated, if I may,” amid loud laughter.
UN speeches are translated simultaneously into six of the UN’s official languages—Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish—but never the banging of shoes.
In another bygone era, Ugandan leader Idi Amin caused a stir when he tried to praise British Prime Minister Edward Heath. He told the assembly that Heath was just like Adolf Hitler—before quickly insisting he meant Winston Churchill.
During the General Assembly sessions, the IPS office on the UN’s fourth floor was an occasional meeting place for representatives of liberation movements accredited to the UN, including the PLO and FRETILIN.
One regular visitor was Jose Ramos-Horta, designated as foreign minister in the government-in-exile set up by the liberation movement FRETILIN (Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor). Winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize and later president of East Timor (2007-2012). Ramos-Horta, according to a widely circulated anecdote, was at a dinner in a restaurant frequented by delegates in the UN neighbourhood, where waiters politely asked guests from what country they were from.
When asked, he proudly claimed he was from East Timor (a former Portuguese possession that was under Indonesian control from 1975 to 1999). “So, you are an Eskimo?” said the waiter, displaying his geographical ignorance. “No, no, no,” replied Ramos-Horta. “I am not an Eskimo; I am from a country called East Timor.”
After he completed his first presidency in 2012, he was appointed as the United Nations’ Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau (UNIOGBIS) in January 2013. When I met him outside the UN on First Avenue, I double-checked the anecdote—and he confirmed it did happen. And we laughed.
Meanwhile, a security officer once recalled an incident where the prime minister from an African country, addressing the General Assembly, was heckled by a group of African students. As is usual with hecklers, the boisterous group was taken off the visitor’s gallery, grilled, photographed and banned from entering the UN premises. But about five years later, one of the hecklers returned to the UN—this time, as foreign minister of his country—and addressed the world body.
Besides Gaddafi, some of the military leaders who addressed the UN included Fidel Castro of Cuba, Amadou Toure of Mali (who assumed power following a coup in 1991 but later served as a democratically elected president), and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana (who seized power in 1979, executed former heads of state but later served as a civilian president voted into power in democratic elections).
Although PLO leader Yasser Arafat made it to the UN, some of the world’s most controversial leaders, including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad, and North Korea’s Kim il Sung and his grandson Kim Jong-un, never made it to the UN.
When the politically charismatic Ernesto Che Guevara, once second-in-command to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was at the United Nations to address the General Assembly sessions back in 1964, the U.N. headquarters came under attack—literally. The speech by the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary was momentarily drowned by the sound of an explosion.
The anti-Castro forces in the United States, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had mounted an insidious campaign to stop Che Guevara from speaking. A 3.5-inch bazooka was fired at the 39-storeyed Secretariat building by the East River while a vociferous CIA-inspired anti-Castro, anti-Che Guevara demonstration was taking place outside the U.N. building on New York’s First Avenue and 42nd Street.
But the rocket launcher—which was apparently not as sophisticated as today’s shoulder-fired missiles and rocket-propelled grenades—missed its target, rattled windows, and fell into the river about 200 yards from the building. One newspaper report described it as “one of the wildest episodes since the United Nations moved into its East River headquarters in 1952.”
As long-time UN staffers would recall, the failed 1964 bombing of the UN building took place when Che Guevara launched a blistering attack on US foreign policy and denounced a proposed de-nuclearisation pact for the Western hemisphere.
It was one of the first known politically motivated terrorist attacks on the United Nations. After his Assembly speech, Che Guevara was asked about the attack aimed at him. “The explosion has given the whole thing more flavour,” he joked as he chomped on his Cuban cigar.
When he was told by a reporter that the New York City police had nabbed a woman, described as an anti-Castro Cuban exile, who had pulled out a hunting knife and jumped over the UN wall, intending to kill him, Che Guevara said, “It is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun.”
(This article contains excerpts from a book on the United Nations titled “No Comment—and Don’t Quote Me on That,” authored by Thalif Deen, Senior Editor at Inter Press Service news agency. A former member of the Sri Lanka delegation to the General Assembly sessions, he is a Fulbright scholar with a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University, New York, and twice shared the gold medal for excellence in UN reporting awarded annually by the UN Correspondents Association (UNCA). The book is available on Amazon. The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows:
https://www.amazon.com/No-Comment-dont-quote-that/dp/064811838X)
Print Edition – The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka
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