The Cherry Orchard

I’ve earnestly been trying to keep up with the United Nations General Assembly debates, checking in on day two, day three and day four so as to report on the quality and integrity of each speech by each national representative.  This was the first time I’ve tried to pay anywhere near this much attention to UN’s annual autumn bash, and four days in I am already over my head.  Discouraged by technical problems at the UN.org website and frustrating lapses in coverage (such as the failure to provide an English translation of Venezuelan President Huge Chavez’s speech, which made the biggest headlines of the event so far when he called George W. Bush “the devil”), I’m now aiming for coverage that will be more impressionistic than complete, and I’ll try to dig in harder next year (assuming the planet and the institution known as the United Nations are both intact by next year, and I hope both will be).

As I said above, Chavez stole the headlines.  I don’t think George W. Bush is quite the devil, but I’d probably rather spend a day at the beach with Chavez than with George Bush, and I am amused to learn that the Venezuelan President and I share a high regard for Noam Chomsky who, I agree, everybody should read.

 In contrast to Chavez, here are the surprising words of Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq, who seems to like George Bush more than either I or Hugo Chavez do:

“We here renew our gratitiude for these forces that took part in liberating our country from the worst dictatorship known in history.  We specifically thank George W. Bush for his leadership of the campaign to liberate Iraq from tyranny and opening the doors for a new, democratic, pluralistic and federal Iraq that is at peace with itself and the world.”

Maybe this goes to show that theoretical issues of war and aggression look rather different when you are inside the nation fighting the war then when you’re sitting in Venezuela reading Noam Chomsky or Queens, New York posting to a blog. However one spins it all, it’s clear that a few causes get all the mic time at this debate: Israel and Palestine are number one, America and Iraq a distant second, Darfur virtually nowhere at all.

But what are we to think when despicable royals like Prince Faisal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia say all the right things about the importance of compromise settlements between Israel and Palestine, while Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel fails to rise to the occasion at all?  I’d hoped Israel’s plucky young representative would throw a curve-ball or otherwise try to inject some sand into the vaseline of international hypocrisy on display here, but she instead delivers a cool-toned speech including some prayers in Hebrew and an invocation of Ariel Sharon as “a great leader” – something even a person who cares deeply about the fate of Israel (such as myself) cannot agree with.

Leave it to Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine to deliver the best speech I’ve read so far, in which he speaks passionately for a fair peace and wistfully recalls the still-surprising and, of course, infinitely difficult 1993 compromise agreement between Yasser Arafat of Palestine and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.  We need more speeches like this one, and we need more moderate world leaders like Mahmoud Abbas.

The debate returns on Monday with speeches by representatives of several straggler nations that didn’t make the cut for the kickoff sessions, including Laos, Nepal, Vietnam, Gabon, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Gambia, and Uruguay.