Mottley invokes Haile Selassie's 'war' warning in UN General Assembly address
Barbados' prime minister used a 36-minute speech to the 81st session to criticise UN inaction and stand with Cuba, Haiti, Guyana and Venezuela.
NEW YORK, United States. Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley delivered another scathing assessment of conditions facing many nations when she addressed the opening of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 24.
In a 36-minute address, Ms Mottley ranged across climate change, the impact of artificial intelligence, Africa's exclusion from membership of the Security Council, the UN's inaction on numerous issues and wars around the world.
She then turned to her country's concern for regional partners Cuba, Haiti, Guyana and Venezuela, expressing solidarity with them and describing their needs as "dire". She repudiated what she characterised as the lack of intervention by the global organisation.
A message from 1963
For many listeners, it was her closing passage that resonated most. Ms Mottley quoted words first spoken by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I at the same venue on October 4, 1963.
"Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned ... there will be war."
The passage is familiar across the Caribbean through "War", the 1976 recording by Jamaican reggae singer Robert Nesta Marley, which adapted the emperor's speech. Ms Mottley did not reference the song, crediting the words to the Ethiopian monarch.
As she spoke, representatives from numerous nations were seen mouthing the words.
"That's why we regard him as our true messiah," said Jah Paul Haughton, a Jamaican Rastafarian based in Brooklyn. "She (PM Mottley) is the only diplomat to recognise his prophecy."
Ms Mottley also borrowed from Dionne Warwick to bolster her argument: "What the world needs now is 'love sweet love.'"
Sparrow remembered in Jamaica
The address came days before the death of the Mighty Sparrow, the calypso king born Slinger Francisco, who died on Sunday, September 27, aged 91.
Born in Grenada and raised and crowned in Trinidad and Tobago, he was also a regular visitor to Jamaica. In the years when mento and ska dominated Jamaican radio, calypso found its slot on a five-minute morning segment on RJR called "Calypso Corner".
In the years after Jamaica's independence in 1962, he became the main attraction at Kingston's biggest New Year's Eve gala at the Pegasus Hotel, and, with Byron Lee, helped launch the first Jamaica Carnival in 1990 at Port Royal.
In New York he featured prominently on the WIADCA Dimanche Gras line-up, and he was invited to perform at an inaugural ball for the presidency of Barack Obama hosted by the Organization of American States.
