Gaddafi rages against superpowers for 100 minutes
“Veto power should be annulled,” Gaddafi said. “The Security Council did not provide us with security but with terror and sanctions.”
Gaddafi also called for an investigation into the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, questioning why the UN Charter’s provisions against aggression were held in sacred status when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 but “thrown in the bin” when the country itself was invaded.
“The invasion of Iraq — without justification, in violation of the Charter — occurs by superpowers on the Security Council,” he said.
“And Iraq is an independent nation and a member of the General Assembly. How is it that it was attacked and how is it that the Charter was not applied?”
Hugo Chavez calls George W Bush ‘the devil’
He went on to deliver a blistering attack on Bush’s policies, citing a US-backed Israeli military operation in Lebanon that killed more than 1,000 people and destroyed large parts of the country’s civilian infrastructure weeks earlier.
“The government of the United States doesn’t want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war,” Chavez said.
“It wants peace. But what’s happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What’s happening? What’s happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela — new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?”
Fidel Castro
delivered a lengthy critique of global inequality.
“The National General Assembly of the Cuban people condemns large-scale landowning as a source of poverty for the peasant and a backward and inhuman system of agricultural production,” Castro said
“It condemns starvation wages and the iniquitous exploitation of human work by illegitimate and privileged interests,” Castro continued. “It condemns illiteracy, the lack of teachers, of schools, doctors and hospitals, the lack of old-age security in the countries of America.”
He also denounced the “exploitation of women” as well as “military oligarchies, which keep our peoples in poverty, prevent their democratic development and the full exercise of their sovereignty”.
He went on for 269 minutes, according to UN records. One year after that speech, the US tried but failed to overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
