37 Days to Go – Don’t Bank on the UN Leadership

By Sherwin Pomerantz

The countdown continues and there are now 37 days to go to the opening of the UN General Assembly and the vote on Palestinian statehood.

When looking ahead to September there are two people whose names you should know but my guess is you have never heard of them. One is Nawaf Salam and the other is Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser. Now you probably don’t recognize these people and they are certainly not the names of any people who are likely to live next door to most of my readers but they may very well become key players in the drama that will be played out in New York next month.

Nawaf Salam is the Lebanese Ambassador to the UN and at the end of this month he will take over as President of the UN Security Council for the month of September. A well-educated Lebanese native he holds a doctorate in Political Science from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, an LLM from Harvard Law School and a doctorate in History from the Sorbonne. Now one would think that if there has to be an Arab conducting Security Council meetings in September that someone with his background would be the best of the best in the pursuit of fair and balanced debate. Yet, let’s look at some of his recent statements.

On the debate last week on increasing sanctions on Syria, Salam said: “Lebanon decided to disassociate itself from the council statement condemning violence in Syria,” a position slammed as shocking by Lebanon’s Future Movement lawmaker Ahmed Fatfat. In a debate on Israel on December 19, 2008, Salam said:

"Continued settlement activity (by Israel) is illegal anywhere in the occupied territories and is an obstacle to peace…. Israel must immediately dismantle all settlement outposts and freeze all future building in the occupied territories including Jerusalem…. Israel continues to subject Gaza to an immoral and illegal siege."

So not sure how much neutral adjudication of the upcoming meeting we will get from this source.

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser is the Ambassador of Qatar and he is the President of the 61st General Assembly which will convene in September in New York. He holds a degree in law from Beirut Arab University and has been at the UN since September 1998. Prior to that he was the Ambassador to Jordan and was previously at the UN Mission as minister to that mission. He also served in Pakistan and Dubai. He is also an advisory member of NYU’s Center for Dialogues.

While it is almost impossible to find any record of significant remarks made by the Qatari ambassador, one of his first tasks will be to preside over Durban III just before the UN General Assembly convenes. What is instructive is to view the remarks of the head of Qatar’s delegation to the first Durban conference, Abdul-Rahman H. Al-Attiyah when he declared “all the Israeli heinous violations are justified as a means to bring back every Jew to a land that they raped from its legitimate owners and denied their right to claim it back.” So we know where the Ambassador is coming from on that issue.

Al-Nasser will, as well, probably reflect his emir’s current agenda. During the opening days of the General Assembly in September of last year, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani said “The war on terror…has plunged us into a kind of war with no limits, nor end, nor logic, nor legal or moral conditions…We believe that even as the phenomenon of terrorist exists, it should not be treated by waging wars…To the contrary it has…undermined the efforts made in dialogue among cultures.”

And by the way, if the President cannot chair a particular meeting, he can turn the gavel over to one of his vice-presidents of whom one is Iran’s UN Ambassador, Mohammad Khazael, who in an earlier interview cited the “important issue” of the “Durban Conference focusing on racial discrimination.”

So September will also be interesting as Israel pleads its case before arbiters who are among the least friendly nations of the world to put it mildly.

Someone once said “We will remember not the names of our enemies but the silence of our friends.” It will be an interesting month to be sure as we find out who are friends really are, and we must continue our efforts to convince the delegates to the UN to vote NO on a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood.