Annual U.N. summit yields traffic jams and accords

UNITED NATIONS — So many world leaders have converged on the United Nations over the past week that at one point billionaire Bill Gates was left cooling his heels on East 46th Street in a "pedestrian freeze" while a presidential motorcade whizzed the wrong way down First Avenue.

The founder of Microsoft was on his way to a U.N. summit to donate $167.8 million to eradicate malaria. Which makes you wonder: Which president was that, anyway?

It's hard enough to get your arms around what goes on around the globe in a single day. But that might be easier than coping with the Manhattan traffic jams and restaurant reservations when nearly all the world's leaders turn up in a single building over a single week.

Petty despots and benevolent dictators, venerable prime ministers and newly minted presidents all have been floating through the curved corridors of the U.N. complex and riding the elevators at least once to the top of the 38-story tower on the East River for a brief meeting with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Coiffed and crisp, the 75 heads of state and 36 heads of government who came are trailed by security guards with plastic coils hanging out of their ears. At one point, reporters managed to corner Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe in a hallway, where the BBC's U.N. correspondent asked if he'd be back next year.

"What, are you a witch?" the 84-year-old president shot back.

"Of course I'll be back, why not?" he added with a chuckle, before turning to questions about a power-sharing deal.

No matter the size of the entourage, no matter the ability to bring peace or wreak havoc, all the world's leaders are equalized by decorum as they take to the podium for the General Assembly's annual debate.

Taro Aso had been prime minister of Japan for less than 24 hours Saturday when it was his turn. When the equipment used to provide simultaneous translation malfunctioned, Aso showed no signs of stage fright.

"It's not a Japanese machine ... ?" he joked in English.

In his opening address, Ban set the theme: How to rescue a lagging U.N. anti-poverty program from oil- and food-price shocks and meet its goal of lifting half the world's "bottom billion" out of poverty by 2015.

But of all the crises, the most preoccupying was the one unfolding on Wall Street just a few miles away. Friends and foes of America, accustomed to being lectured, are giving it back.

"Fabulous fortunes cannot be wasted while millions are starving and dying of curable diseases," Cuba's First Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura declared.

U.N. technicians laid about 1,300 miles of television cable around the complex to ensure the talkfest could be broadcast to every country in the world. And so a sheik declares his government's agenda to improve the lot of women, and the president of a small island complains his country isn't profiting enough from of the sale of tuna fished from its waters.

While the speeches are the most visible part of the annual gathering, they obscure the real business — a flurry of diplomacy at meetings, cocktail parties, seminars and dinners.

While the Bush administration failed to gain agreement on its priority — new sanctions to press Iran to stop its nuclear program — other accords emerged from leaders talking quietly.

"I am a popular advocate of this kind of talk where people, who use being in town for the [General Assembly], sit down in hotel conference rooms or mission offices, where they are able to see each other, and exchange ideas," says Shashi Tharoor, a former U.N. undersecretary-general.

Delegates from smaller countries that didn't want to pay for expensive hotel suites booked tiny cubicles adjacent to the domed General Assembly chamber, each with its own Oriental rug and red leatherette chairs, to sort out their problems.

One morning, a low-level minister from Africa, who asked not to be identified because it might appear unseemly talking to a foreign reporter, was arguing with other African delegates about how to schedule a meeting on aid to rural women.

By dinner, she was listening to glamorous first ladies from France and Jordan and the wife of media baron Rupert Murdoch hold forth on maternal mortality.

"I go back to my country with new ideas and new business cards," said the minister, "and very sore feet."