The world is in a critical state, judging by the speeches that opened the 79th session of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. From the catastrophism of the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who has predicted “the end of humanity” due to wars and the impact of climate change, to the “whirlwind” denounced by the Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, for whom the current state of the world is literally unsustainable, the messages of world leaders have warned of the obvious: to the succession of ongoing wars – this plenary session is defined by two major conflicts, those of Ukraine and Gaza – are added the threats against the survival of the planet and the unfathomable challenge of new technologies, with artificial intelligence at the head. But the world also suffers from other old and sometimes forgotten challenges, such as the fight against hunger, which was ardently defended by the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the first speaker of the 79th Assembly.
The growing conflict in the Middle East, with Lebanon on the brink of all-out war, has cast a shadow over the session, an annual and traditional event that does not seem to have caught New York City off guard: this week, taxis are applying a special congestion charge and the area around the UN is becoming a spiderweb of traffic jams. The city, however, is rubbing its hands together at the economic return that the gathering of world leaders provides to its coffers, according to the mayor’s office, the equivalent of hosting three Super Bowls in just one week. But practical problems aside, the real discomfort of the plenary has been in the leaders’ messages, which are far from complacent and even less optimistic, except for Joe Biden, about the world’s ills.
Petro denounced that millions of hectares of the Amazon rainforest have been burned in just one month due to global warming. In his third speech before the UN, he railed against countries that have the “power to destroy the life of humanity” and ignore the repeated requests made at the UN by the majority of the international community in favour of the Palestinians in Gaza. “They don’t listen to us when we vote in favour of stopping the genocide in Gaza,” lamented Petro, echoing the widespread clamour in the so-called global south. The emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, also denounced Israel’s “crime of genocide” against the Palestinian population. The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, also devoted a large part of his speech to calling for an end to the war in the Strip.
Among the speakers on the first day of the 79th Assembly were also the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, who was received outside the UN by a large demonstration of opponents who demanded his arrest; the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan; King Abdullah of Jordan, a party with a particular interest in the conflict in Gaza and Lebanon, and the leaders of Poland and Argentina. Javier Milei had some words of criticism about the latter, although without mentioning him, from his Colombian counterpart. The massive Israeli attack on his country forced the prime minister of Lebanon, Najib Mikati, to cancel his speech. The arrival of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was postponed until Thursday and will finally speak at the plenary on Friday, according to his ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon. However, the trip will depend on the “dynamics of what is happening in Israel,” warned the diplomat.
On the Gaza conflict, the King of Jordan warned, or rather recalled, that his country cannot allow itself to be “an alternative homeland for the Palestinians,” and that it will “never accept the forced displacement of Palestinians, which is a war crime.” Aware that the stability of the Hashemite kingdom depends on maintaining the status quo—half of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin, and the spectre of the Black September,The monarch, speaking in his speech after the civil war between the PLO and the kingdom of Hussein, father of Abdullah, in 1970, dedicated his speech to the war in Gaza and harshly criticised Israel. “There are extremists who are dragging our region to the brink of all-out war, and this includes those who continue to propagate the idea of Jordan as an alternative homeland. I will be very, very clear: that will never happen, we will never accept the forced displacement of Palestinians,” he stressed. The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also spoke out on the genocide in Gaza, blaming the international community for its inaction in Gaza and intoning a requiem for the UN and its inability to stop the violence in the Strip, which he nevertheless urged Netanyahu to stop, as humanity once did against Hitler.
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Along with those in Gaza and Ukraine, the war in Sudan also made its way into several speeches. Notable among them were those by Guterres and President Biden, who urged the international community to stop arming the warring parties. But he did so without mentioning specific countries, as this would have implied a reference to the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Washington.
