UN Ambassador: Speech is a joint effort
While the occasion of Belize’s Prime Minister addressing the UN will always be headline news, the story neither begins nor ends with his words from the podium. This afternoon we caught up with Belize’s UN Ambassador, Stuart Leslie. He told News Five’s Stewart Krohn that the crafting of the five minute address is a process involving many different minds.
Stuart Leslie, UN Ambassador, Via Phone
“The speech was first drafted here in New York and then the Prime Minister chooses what he calls the theme, where he consults with Belmopan, with the P.S. for some of the multilateral things, he consults with Ambassador Shoman on the Guatemala issue, he consults with our office here in New York and then he has his own ideas. So we all get together and we draft a speech. Almost everybody comes in with an idea of a speech in mind, then we get together and it’s literally trashed out to pieces and he sits down as the arbitrator and says take this out, put this in, I don’t like to say that, say this this way. And so it has broad based consultations, so a bunch of us has a go at the speech before it was prepared.”
Stewart Krohn
“Having come up with this kind of speech designed by committee, really, how important is it exactly what our prime minister or for that matter, what any world leader has to say. Who is really watching and listening to this speech?”
Stuart Leslie
“I think you’ve asked the question that most journalists are asking right now, and that is what’s the use of having these big summits anyway? The speech is being watched by… This sets the policies for the Belize Government in terms of multilateral diplomacy. Said Musa as the prime minister has decided that one of Belize’s foremost concerns right now is globalisation, good governance and in the speech he talks about some of the things that Belize has done over the past years since he has been prime minister to try and comply with organisations that are money lenders, that are relieving debt et cetera. So what he has done is to try to explain, since they were all sitting there, from President Clinton down the line, was this is where Belize sees itself, now this is where Belize wants to go. He said in his speech that Belize is a country that from the margins of enjoying the fruits of globalisation, but we can fall back or we can go forward. He’s outlined in three minutes how we go forward, one of them is good governance and he says that good governance is not just about Belize as a government, but about NGOs pulling their parts, civil society pulling its part, the citizens pulling its part and the whole global community, all focusing on poverty eradication, educating children, sharing technologies.”
Stewart Krohn
“Mr. Ambassador answer this question for me, exactly what does Belize give to the UN and what does Belize get from the UN?”
Stuart Leslie
“Stewart, every Belizean is concerned about the Guatemalan problem. Multilateral diplomacy isn’t something that will… that you can come at the end of the year with a check mark and say okay, we got so much millions of dollars to build this, so much millions of dollars to build that. In multilateral diplomacy, you do first and foremost maintain peace with your neighbour and if I can just divert for one minute, I must say that an excellent speech was given by the President of Guatemala this morning, where he reiterated again that the Guatemalans decisions as far as any kind of conflict is concerned, is to settle it through dialogue. So I both sides were sending reconciliatory messages today. Belize made no mention of the Guatemalan problem.”
Leslie told News Five that the decision to leave the Guatemalan claim out of each leader’s speech was worked out in advance by mutual agreement between the two countries.
