MINSK, 21 December (BelTA) – A recent episode of the documentary series Time Chose Us aired by the TV channel Belarus One focused on the speech Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko delivered at a session of the UN General Assembly in 2005, BelTA has learned.
On 15 September 2005 the UN General Assembly hosted a summit, which the organizers called a logical continuation of the Millennium Summit held in 2000. As many as 170 presidents, monarchs, and heads of governments gathered in the hall.
Aleksandr Lukashenko was among the participants. The speech of the Belarusian leader was radically different from the statements of politicians, who from the UN rostrum expressed the approval of actions of the United States of America – the country responsible for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Today’s world is unipolar. With all the consequences it entails. Blooming Yugoslavia has been defeated and has disappeared from the map of Europe. Long-suffering Afghanistan has turned into a hotbed of conflicts and drug trafficking. The bloodbath in Iraq continues to this day. The country has become a source of instability in a vast region. Iran and North Korea, Colombia, Cuba, and other states are targeted with weapons,” Lukashenko said in his speech.
The statements by the Belarus president at the UN General Assembly session inspired other leaders. A year later the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez would utter his famous words from the same rostrum.
“Yesterday the devil was here! It still smells of sulfur here. I call the president of the United States the devil,” Hugo Chavez would say.
A couple of years later the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi would distinguish himself by throwing out the UN Charter in front of an astonished audience during his speech.
Described by reporters as “thunder in paradise,” Aleksandr Lukashenko’s speech was also a forerunner of Vladimir Putin’s famous speech at the Munich Conference in 2007.
You can learn even more about significant and vivid events of the past years in BelTA’s YouTube-project “How it was: DOC”.
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