Friends, not

Neil McFarquhar has an article in The New York Times about the United Nations:

Hillary Rodham Clinton, sharing a podium during the United Nations General Assembly with half a dozen of the world’s most powerful political women, was waxing enthusiastic about the success of the Arab uprisings when she gave a sudden shout-out to Tunisia. “Thank you, minister,” Clinton, the secretary of state, enthused, as she pointed toward the country’s new minister of women’s affairs. “I think we should give Tunisia a round of applause.”
By rights, this should be the year of Arab uprisings at the yearly gathering of presidents, kings, and other potentates. Some of the world’s longest-serving tyrants (and once star attractions among the weeklong marathon of speeches) have been overthrown. The fresh faces here represent nascent Arab governments that profess to want to follow the principles of human rights and good government that the United Nations embodies.
Undoubtedly there have been some thrilling moments for them, in particular a pantheon of world leaders spending several hours making somewhat self-congratulatory speeches about the success of the United Nations in supporting the Libyan rebels. But new tensions in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute largely overshadowed the Arab Spring.
The dispute that has preoccupied the building for the entire week is peaking Friday with dueling speeches less than an hour apart by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, promising to further overshadow those fresh faces of the Arab Spring.
For Lilia Labidi, minister of women’s affairs since the Tunisian revolution in January, her first giddy exposure to the United Nations rapidly dissipated. Her own appeal to the gathering for help in consolidating gains for women in Tunisia elicited little reaction, with Clinton, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and various other female heads of state sweeping out of the meeting on empowering women without stopping for even a hello. Labidi, although a guest of the United Nations, decided to go home. “I cannot live here in such luxury,” she said, noting that the $700-a-day cost of her stay in New York would be better spent on a project for rural women. “To the degree that the Arab Spring is important, one would have wanted more than a warm welcome and a group photograph, what am I bringing back to the Tunisian women?” she said over breakfast in a midtown Manhattan coffee shop. “The attention of the world has to be much more engaged in our region.” Labidi, a soft-spoken professor of anthropology and clinical psychology, said she found it frustrating that the question she was asked the most by people had little bearing on her projects, like improving girls’ access to elementary school. The question she heard over and over: What effect will the revolution have on Tunisian attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, conducts a version of political speed-dating during the gathering, holding a fifteen-minute meeting with each delegation. Virtually every leader has brought up the need to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, said a senior aide, while he could not remember any discussions about the Arab revolutions.
When they do come up, they tend to be the connection between the two, all the references about self-determination and political freedom throwing the spotlight on the lack of it for the Palestinians. “We cannot respond to this aspiration for freedom and democracy,” President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said in his speech, “so splendidly and bravely expressed by the Arab peoples, by perpetuating a tragedy, that of the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
If there was one new international political star at the gathering, it was Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the leader of Libya’s Transitional National Council, who drew the kind of attention that had photographers knocking one another to the ground in the scrums that developed around his movements. “Blessings go out to Libya!” yelled one woman repeatedly as the melee subsided. “This is a great day for all Libyans inside and outside the country,” Abdel-Jalil said, right after the Libya conference, walking around, like the rest of the delegation, with a smile permanently plastered to his face.
Of course, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi caused quite a stir when he showed up in 2009, though that was inspired because he spoke for ninety minutes instead of the allotted fifteen, then appeared to tear the charter of the United Nations while suggesting that the world body move to his hometown, Surt (now embattled), and set off a media frenzy about where he would pitch his much-traveled, signature tent.
“Another abuse of Libyan resources!” recalled Ibrahim O. Dabbashi, Libya’s deputy permanent representative and one of the first Libyan diplomats to break with the government after the revolution erupted. He added: “We felt then that he was just not a normal person. These new people are working in the interests of the Libyan people.”
In fact, this year’s gathering was suffering from something of a despot deficit, or at least the ranks of haranguers raging against the evils of capitalism and the West have been drastically thinned by revolutions or disease. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, undergoing chemotherapy treatment in Cuba, literally mailed it in, sending a letter to the Secretary-General demanding an independent Palestinian state.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, much diminished at home by his confrontation with the country’s supreme leader, has said the same thing so many times at the United Nations that it has taken on the aura of a ritual monotony. When a Western ambassador was asked what he anticipated from Ahmadinejad’s speech, he quipped, “We are preparing our usual contingency walkout plan.” Right on schedule, Ahmadinejad prompted a walkout by the United States and the European countries by implying that conspiracies lay behind the 11 September attacks and the Holocaust.
Events that actually concentrated on the Arab world tended to take place on the sidelines. Norway organized a seminar on the role of social media in confronting totalitarian governments, while France, as current president of the Group of 8 economic powers, held a meeting to reconfirm the international financial assistance pledged to the emerging governments.
There, at least, the Tunisian foreign minister, Mohammed Mouldi Kefi, provided the soaring rhetoric somewhat absent at the main event at Turtle Bay. In expressing the wish that Tunisia and other Arab countries would soon join the ranks of the world’s leading democracies, he said, “I hope that this unfinished symphony that we are now playing can become Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.”

Rico says that Alle Menchen werden Brüder isn't true, especially in Turtle Bay...