Translated material
Peace Tribune
Session of the UN General Assembly opens
Today the main international forum opens in New York - the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly. The work of the assembled delegations will continue from the third Tuesday of September to the third week of December, but the cycle will formally end only a year later with the opening of the next session. The forum will be chaired by the Chairman of the UN General Assembly, former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann.An agreement between the US government and the UN obliges Washington to issue entry visas to the leaders of all UN member states wishing to participate in the GA session. But scandals over visas have already become a tradition. Yesterday, US Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called on US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to ban Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from entering the US, calling him "a major supporter of Islamic fundamentalism and an enemy of the United States." The senator is convinced that Ahmadinejad uses the UN rostrum only to “sow hatred.” “I will soon go to the UN headquarters, and this year during my trip to New York you will hear a lot of good news,” the Iranian president recently told reporters.
Heads of state and government, as well as foreign ministers, usually take part in the general debate of the UN General Assembly, which this time will begin on September 23. The day before, the session will host a high-level meeting on “Africa's Development Needs: Progress on Various Commitments, Challenges and the Way Forward.” But as Alexander Gorelik, director of the UN Information Center in Moscow, told Vremya Novostei, the “key high-level event” will be the meeting on September 25. His work will be based on two recently published UN reports on the primary goal of the millennium - to halve the scale of poverty in the world by 2015. Our interlocutor is convinced that “the topic of climate change will also come up very prominently, because by December 2009 the fate of the “post-Kyoto agreements” should be decided.” The culminating event of the session will be the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10.
Mr. Gorelik predicts an “extremely lively and very sharp” course of the general political discussion, because a number of events of the year, including the unilaterally declared independence of Kosovo, the Russian-Georgian conflict and subsequent events in the Caucasus, “greatly confused the cards.” An unprecedented meeting of the foreign ministers of Turkey, Azerbaijan and Armenia will become a sensation on the sidelines of the forum. “To discuss long-standing disputes,” it was proposed by Turkish Minister Ali Babacan. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who recently visited Ankara, may also join them. They will discuss the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement and the situation in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov will report from the GA rostrum on the impact of “frozen conflicts” on the security of the region. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan will also speak.
Another hot topic will be the independence of Kosovo. Serbia, having secured the support of Moscow, will submit a draft resolution of the UN General Assembly, inviting the International Court of Justice in The Hague to give an opinion on the compliance with international law of the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo on February 17. So far it has been recognized by 46 of the 192 UN member countries. In a conversation with VN, Mr. Gorelik expressed hope that the participants in the UNGA session “will hear and understand each other, find common ground.”