UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said world leaders attending this year's annual ministerial meeting of the UN General Assembly face more "daunting challenges" than ever before in the world body's history -- from combating global warming and fighting poverty to ending the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region and promoting Mideast peace.
The high-level session opened yesterday with speeches by Ban and US President George W. Bush. Later in the day Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose controversial views have dominated the headlines and provoked widespread outrage and protests in the US, was to take the podium.
Many leaders have been here since Friday when the secretary-general began a series of meetings on key global issues and hotspots -- Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and climate change.
"This will be a most intense period of multilateral diplomacy ever in the United Nations' history, I believe," Ban told a preview press conference last week. "As we move well into the 21st century, the United Nations is, once again, the global forum where issues are discussed and solutions are hammered out."
The ministerial meeting of the 62nd General Assembly is the first for Ban, who took the reins of the UN on Jan. 1 from Kofi Annan. Nearly 100 presidents and prime ministers are attending, along with senior officials from 91 other UN member states. Only Djibouti is not scheduled to speak during the high-level session which ends Oct. 3, Janos Tisovszky, spokesman for the General Assembly president, said on Monday.
"I'm very anxious. At the same time I am very much full of commitment and expectations to make this General Assembly -- my first General Assembly as secretary-general -- to be [the] most successful one," Ban said earlier this month.
"Never before in the history of the United Nations, this General Assembly is faced with so many daunting challenges," he said.
The advance meetings culminated on Monday with the first UN climate summit, attended by more than 80 national leaders and two celebrities with "green" credentials -- former US vice president Al Gore and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
By contrast, Bush skipped the summit but attended a 25-nation dinner hosted by Ban for major emitters of greenhouse gases like the US and small island nations and poor countries likely to be most affected by climate change.
Ban is seeking to build political momentum for deep cutbacks in emissions of carbon dioxide and other man-made gases blamed for global warming, but Bush opposes mandatory limits. He is hosting his own climate meeting in Washington tomorrow and Friday.
After Monday's dinner, the secretary-general said "everybody agreed that it is now time to act before it is too late" and the best place is the UN, where the main climate change body will be meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December. Ban said participants agreed the current international response is inadequate and that broader action is necessary.
Meanwhile, Israel's top diplomat on Monday criticized the UN for allowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to address the world body.
"In a just world, his visit would never have been authorized and Iran would not be a member of the United Nations," Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said.
"For Ahmadinejad to come here -- the UN should be ashamed. It is shameful for a world that does not understand that Ahmadinejad is exploiting international values to harm us all.
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