News just in from Colum Lynch at FP’s Turtle Bay blog:
Sha Zukang, the U.N. undersecretary general for Economic and Social Affairs and the organization’s most senior Chinese official, offered U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a toast last week at a retreat in the Alpine resort town Alpbach that degenerated into an intoxicated rant against the United Nations, the United States, and his boss, Turtle Bay has learned.
“I know you never liked me Mr. Secretary-General — well, I never liked you, either,” Sha told Ban at a dinner attended by the U.N.’s top brass, according to a senior U.N. official who attended the event. “I didn’t want to come to New York. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But I’ve come to love the U.N. and I’m coming to admire some things about you.”
The blunt dinner remarks — which came after Sha had a few drinks — prompted U.N. officials to approach Sha and try to coax him into putting down the microphone, according to a U.N. spokesman and several U.N. sources who were there. It didn’t work. Sha continued a lengthy speech, in which he also expressed his antipathy toward the United States. “It was a tribute gone awry,” said a second senior U.N. official who was at the dinner. “It went on for about ten or fifteen minutes but it felt like an hour.” Ban was described as having smiled and nodded awkwardly during the Sha rant, but he allowed the dinner to continue.
U.N. officials said that Sha realized that he had gone too far, and that he spent much of the following day out of sight. “Sha Zukang was deeply apologetic when he met the Secretary General in person early the following morning at his own request,” said Farhan Haq, the acting deputy U.N. spokesman, in a statement to Turtle Bay. “He said that he had risen to speak the previous evening because he felt that recent criticisms of the Secretary General had been unfair and that he wanted to set the record straight. However, Sha told the Secretary General that he realized that the way that he spoke, coming as it did after he had had a few drinks, was inappropriate, as it went too far. He was also aware that his statements had embarrassed and irritated other senior advisors.”
[snip]
Sha’s colleagues, including Catherine Bragg, a humanitarian relief official, tried to approach Sha to persuade him to calm down. But Shaw continued. At one stage, Sha singled out a senior U.N. official, Bob Orr of the United States, and said “I really don’t like him: he’s an American and I really don’t like Americans,” according to the senior official. But he then went on to credit Orr for delivering a commendable speech at the U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen, in which Orr praised Ban for taking a courageous stand and laying the groundwork for progress on global warming. “He was right,” Sha said, according to the official.
