These were the eight points that were to be addressed: halve the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, ensure primary education for all, promote gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, stop the spread of HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, develop a global partnership for development.

After 15 years, the words of some representatives of UN member states when confronted with these issues do not raise eyebrows as ‘amusing outbursts’.  ‘From the passionate to the provocative to the simply bizarre’ they no longer all appear so “crazy”, but they certainly give tragic reasons why the UN is what it is today.

1-. Krishna Menon, Indian diplomat, 1957. ‘The Security Council considers this a dispute. But it is not a dispute over a territory. There is only one problem before you - the problem of aggression.’

It was the longest speech ever given in a UN council: eight hours of stonewalling in defence of India in its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. During the speech Menon collapsed and had to be hospitalised: then he came back and continued speaking, assisted by a doctor who controlled his blood pressure.

2-. Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, 1960. ‘If Kennedy wasn't a millionaire, illiterate and ignorant he would understand that you can't have a revolt against peasants’.

Castro wasn't joking either, exactly fifty years ago, when he violently criticised Kennedy, Nixon and US imperialism for four and a half hours at the height of the crisis in US-Cuban relations. Castro is also linked to another bizarre memory from that year's assembly: he asked for live chickens in his hotel room.

3-. Nikita Kruschev, President of the Soviet Union, 1960. ‘President, call those bootlickers of American imperialism to order’.

It was one of the most symbolic moments of the Cold War. With this sentence Kruschev silenced a delegate from the Philippines who was attacking Soviet imperialism, and then took off his shoe and banged it hard on the table.

4-. Henry Cabot Lodge, US Ambassador, 1960. ‘As you can see for yourself, we have here today a clear example of Soviet espionage’.

In the same year, during a discussion on the shooting down of an American spy plane over Soviet territory, US Ambassador Lodge went on the attack: he showed the assembly a wooden eagle donated by the Soviet-American Friendship Society to the American Embassy and with tweezers pulled a small microphone out of its beak. After Lodge's gesture, the Soviet Union's resolution condemning US spy flights did not pass.

5-. Yasser Arafat, PLO leader, 1974. ‘The old world order is crumbling before our eyes, as imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism, the main expression of which is Zionism, perish ineluctably’.

It was the first speech to the General Assembly by the representative of a non-governmental organisation, the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Arafat's attack on Zionism led to the famous UN resolution the following year, ‘Zionism equals racism’, which cooled relations between the General Assembly and Israel.

6-. Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua, 1987. ‘Before addressing those hotheads who propose military actions such as invasion, remember, President Reagan, that Rambo only exists in the movies.’

It was an attack on the United States, by the mouth of Nicaraguan President Ortega, a strong critic of US policy in Central America. In particular for its funding of armed Contras groups and support of the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, which, according to Ortega, ‘has bled Nicaraguans dry’. The US delegate's reaction was to leave: ‘the Nicaraguans may have sat and listened, I didn't’.

7-. Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, 2006. ‘Yesterday the devil passed this way, you can still smell the sulphur’.

Chávez was used to provocative outbursts and the UN assembly was one of his favourite stages. On this occasion, the attack was directed at George W. Bush, who was compared to Satan. The following year Chávez had quoted himself, declaring that ‘there is no smell of sulphur’ since Obama became president.

8-. Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan, 2006. ‘The picture painted by volunteer organisations to solicit assistance and aid has led to negative consequences’.

Al-Bashir denied that genocide was taking place in Darfur, instead accusing Western NGOs of orchestrating a scheme to receive more funding. Bashir, together with Ahmadinejad, also accused Israel of spreading lies to weaken the Sudanese government.

9-. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, 2008. ‘The dignity, integrity and rights of Americans and Europeans are endangered by a small but dangerous group of people called Zionists. Although they are a tiny minority, they have fraudulently and complexly manipulated important slices of the financial, monetary and political centres of the US and several European countries'.

Ahmadinejad has regularly used the UN assembly stage to attack the power of the West, with a particular eye on his arch-enemy, Israel. In 2008 he accused ‘the Zionist entity’ of various crimes, including causing the war in South Ossetia. A feature of the Iranian president's speeches was the strong use of religious rhetoric and Shia teachings.

10-. Mu'ammar Gaddafi, President of Libya, 2009. ‘This should not be called the Security Council, but the Council of Terrorism’.

After forty years in power in Libya, Gaddafi spoke for the first - and probably the last - time to the General Assembly. The speech lasted one hundred minutes and contained half the conspiracy theories of the century, from accusing the US of creating and spreading swine flu to lying about the Kennedy assassination. Gaddafi's wrath fell mainly on the UN Security Council, which he compared to al Qaeda.

See, Le dieci cose più folli mai dette all’assemblea ONU  

Photo. Chavez addressing to the United Nations General Assembly