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Brace for more venom from U.N.
Sometime in the next few weeks, the U.N. General Assembly will elect a pugnacious, anti-American politician from Nicaragua as its 63rd president.
Not since the final years of the Cold War 20 years ago has a vocal opponent of Washington held this leadership position. But after Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, stole the election in Managua last year, Nicaragua turned on a dime from an alliance with Washington to a close friendship with Fidel and Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The selection is set, and U.N. bylaws require the vote to be taken no later than June 16. Starting in September, the politician in question, Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, will have one of the world’s most prominent podiums from which he can inveigh against Washington. D’Escoto was the Sandinista foreign minister during the 1980s, when Nicaragua was at war with the Reagan administration. Back then, he once described America’s view of his country this way: “They’re saying: ‘You drop dead, or I will kill you.”’ Every one of the world’s 192 nations sends a representative to the General Assembly. Its president directs and coordinates the assembly’s activities, initiatives and ceremonies. The United Nations stands long on ceremony, giving d’Escoto frequent access to the dais.
D’Escoto will be president for one year, beginning September 16, the start of the United Nations’ 63rd session. He will hold office through the new American president’s first eight months in office, when Washington will be trying to repair its relations with the United Nations.
Assembly presidency
Esteemed, senior politicians from around the world are generally chosen to fill the assembly presidency. D’Escoto is to replace Srgjan Hasan Kerim, the former foreign minister of Macedonia. Among the recent presidents are Jan Elliason, who was the Swedish foreign minister and is now the United Nations’ special envoy to Darfur, and Han Seung-soo, now the prime minister of South Korea.
And then there’s d’Escoto, Daniel Ortega’s foreign policy adviser.
Ortega first rose to power in 1979, after he led a popular rebellion that overthrew Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the odious dictator whose family had ruled Nicaragua since 1937. Ortega quickly allied himself with Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union, spawning the proxy conflict with the Reagan administration known as the Contra War.
In 1990, Nicaragua voted Ortega out of office. After that, he lost repeated elections, in 1996 and 2001. Finally he realized he might never return to power under the nation’s electoral rules. So Ortega set out to change them.
He allied himself with Arnoldo Aleman, the corpulent former president. Aleman had defeated Ortega in the 1996 election and was just the sort of corrupt oligarch the Sandinistas had intended to purge from power. In 2003 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for embezzling $100 million from the state treasury.
Together, Ortega and Aleman gained control of a large majority in the National Assembly. With that, Aleman was released from prison, and Ortega was able to change the election law so he would need only 35 percent of the vote to win.
Oil deal
The change proved fortuitous. In last year’s election, Ortega won only 38 percent of the vote. He was president again — even though nearly two-thirds of the nation had voted against him. Chavez, the Venezuelan president, immediately drew Ortega into his fold and worked out an oil deal structured so that Ortega acquired a personal slush fund of several million dollars a year.
The United Nations rotates the General Assembly presidency, and it next goes to the Latin America and Caribbean group. Through 2007, Nicaragua worked carefully and quietly to gain support — so stealthily that the United States did not seem to notice until it was too late. In March, the 33-member group endorsed Nicaragua’s candidacy. That assures Nicaragua’s election when the full General Assembly votes next month.
X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.