Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, took the lectern at the United Nations on Wednesday morning for his first address at the General Assembly and delivered a long and rambling diatribe — far exceeding the 15-minute limit on speeches — against the United Nations Security Council and a host of other perceived enemies, while urging the world to welcome President Obama, referring to him as “our son.”
In the first third of a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes, Colonel Qaddafi focused on what he called the inherent unfairness of the United Nations, which gives the five permanent members of the Security Council far more authority than the nations in the General Assembly. This, Mr. Qaddafi said, was dictatorship, not democracy and, as such, “was terrorism itself.”
“We are not committed to obeying or adhering to resolutions by the Security Council in its composition right now,” he said, adding that the Security Council should be renamed the “Terror Council.” At one point, he even tore the edge of the founding charter of the United Nations he held in his hand, saying he agreed with the document’s preamble but nothing else.
He said the organization’s power dynamic should be reversed — to make the Security Council an instrument designed to “implement the will of the General Assembly.”
Wearing a traditional copper-colored outfit and a pin in the shape of Africa on his chest, Colonel Qaddafi gestured and glowered, with occasional reference to scrawled written notes, and at one point grabbed an audio device to check how his words were being translated. Ali Abdussalam Treki, the Libyan diplomat who now holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council, introduced him as the “leader of the revolution, president of the African Union, King of Kings of Africa.”
