Gaddafi's 2009 UN Speech: What Actually Happened at the Podium

On September 23, 2009, Muammar Gaddafi walked to the podium of the United Nations General Assembly for the first time in the 40 years since he had seized power in Libya. Every speaker at the annual general debate is allotted 15 minutes. Gaddafi spoke for close to 96 minutes, by most accounts of those who timed it, making it the longest address in the history of the general debate and forcing the assembly’s translators to work in staggered shifts to keep up with him.

Gaddafi spoke largely without a prepared text, working instead from a handful of handwritten notes, and used the extended time to range across an unusually wide set of grievances. He devoted much of the speech to an attack on the Security Council’s structure, arguing that its five permanent members should surrender their veto power and that regional bodies like the African Union and the Arab League should take on a greater role in place of individual national seats. He cited what he described as 65 wars fought since the UN’s founding in 1945 as evidence the Council had failed at its core mission, calling it, in one widely quoted line, a body that functioned more like a “terror council” than a peacekeeping one. He also raised colonial-era compensation, floating a figure of $7.77 trillion he said Western powers owed Africa, addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by proposing a single state he called “Isratine,” and revived questions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. At another point he pulled out a paperback copy of the UN Charter, read sections of it aloud, and tore a page from the cover to signal his contempt for what he considered the document’s broken promises. He also singled out President Barack Obama for praise, calling him “a son of Africa” and describing his election as “a flash of light in the darkness.”

Reaction split sharply along predictable lines. Mohamed Ben-Madani, editor of the Maghreb Review, told Al Jazeera the performance had been “a disaster” for the African and Arab delegations Gaddafi claimed to represent, arguing that his rambling delivery undercut legitimate grievances about Security Council reform and colonial history, and that he conspicuously avoided any mention of human rights or education conditions inside Libya itself. Western media coverage, including a widely shared Fox News segment, characterized the speech dismissively as an incoherent “rambling attack” on the UN, framing that obscured the more substantive reform arguments Gaddafi had made about veto power and regional representation, however undiplomatically he delivered them. Within Libya and among some Global South commentators, by contrast, the speech was received far more favorably, seen as a rare instance of a head of state saying openly, on the world’s largest diplomatic stage, what many developing nations had long argued privately about an unequal postwar order.

The claim that the United Nations subsequently scrubbed the speech from its official website has circulated for years but is not well documented; UN webcast archives and transcript records for the 64th General Assembly session, including Gaddafi’s remarks, remain publicly accessible through the UN’s own digital archives. What is not in dispute is the speech’s lasting notoriety. Gaddafi never returned to address the General Assembly again, and less than two years later, in October 2011, he was killed during the Libyan civil war that ended his four-decade rule, leaving the 2009 address as his only, and most infamous, appearance before the body he had spent 96 minutes condemning.