When over 130 world leaders arrive in New York next week for the high-level segment of the United Nations General Assembly, proceedings inside the glasshouse will largely follow a familiar, long-winded rhythm. According to international reports, speeches before the 193-member body and the press briefings that occasionally follow are typically monotonous, rarely producing hard-hitting or headline-grabbing political statements.
Yet the floor of the General Assembly has occasionally erupted into unscripted drama. Historical exceptions are sparse, but when they occur, they shatter the procedural norms of international diplomacy.
In September 2009, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi turned an allotted 15-minute speaking slot into a rambling, one-hour-and-forty-minute address. According to a report in the London Guardian cited by IPS, Gaddafi stretched his time six times longer than permitted to the dismay of UN organizers. During the appearance, he tore up a copy of the UN charter, accused the Security Council of operating as a terrorist body comparable to al-Qaida, and called for former U.S. President George Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to stand trial over the Iraq War.
Gaddafi also demanded $7.7 trillion in African reparations for the ravages of colonialism and questioned whether swine flu was a biological weapon engineered in a military laboratory. The Libyan leader’s visit generated such widespread international media attention that news reports documented 112 different spellings of his name in English and Arabic, prompting a Wall Street Journal cartoon featuring a reporter asking him in Tripoli how his name should actually be spelled.
Decades earlier, Cold War tensions spilled directly onto the assembly floor in October 1960 during a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Philippines. Filipino delegate Lorenzo Sumulong criticized the Soviet bloc, arguing that the peoples of Eastern Europe had been deprived of their civil and political rights and swallowed up by the USSR.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev responded with fury, taking to the podium to denounce the Filipino diplomat as “a jerk, a stooge, and a lackey” as well as “a toady of American imperialism.” While rumors long persisted that Khrushchev punctuated his anger by removing his shoe and banging it on his desk—supported by a single circulating photograph—British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan memorably defused the tension from the floor by asking the Speaker aloud, “I should like that to be translated, if I may,” drawing loud laughter.
Other diplomatic disruptions have included Uganda’s Idi Amin mistakenly comparing British Prime Minister Edward Heath to Adolf Hitler before quickly correcting himself to name Winston Churchill, and the ousting of Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in October 2006 while he was in New York to address the assembly.
As delegations prepare for next week’s high-level segment, UN organizers face the annual uncertainty of whether routine diplomatic addresses will be punctured by unexpected theater.
