OK, does anyone still take the UN seriously? This is worse than Syria chairing the Security Council. Iraq May Chair Disarmament Conference Wed Jan 29, 2:32 PM ET By BARBARA BORST, Associated Press Writer UNITED NATIONS - Iraq is in line to take over as chairman of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in May, prompting one U.S. official Wednesday to say: "The irony is overwhelming." Richard Grenell, spokesman for U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, issued the comment as officials realized Iraq was in line for the rotating post. India now holds it and will be followed by Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland and Israel as countries take the job in alphabetical order. U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said on Tuesday that the choice of conference leaders is "a purely automatic rotation by alphabetical order" with five or six conference presidents each year, each serving a term of about four weeks. "I think you could expect that from time to time a letter would come up that might raise questions in certain quarters, but it has no political significance, I would say," said Eckhard, spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites), when asked if Iraq holding the job did not seem odd. The 66-nation Conference on Disarmament, based in Geneva, is the world's top disarmament forum. It meets annually for 24 weeks in three sessions beginning in January. The U.N. General Assembly established the conference in 1979 with 40 members to consolidate the work of several Geneva, Switzerland-based negotiating bodies that had been set up in the 1960s. The conference, which adopts its decisions by consensus, has negotiated such major multilateral arms limitation and disarmament agreements as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. It also steered talks on the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030129/ap_on_re_mi_ea/un_iraq_disarmament_1 Also, Libya will preside at the March 17-April 25 session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Interesting... http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030120/wl_nm/rights_commission_dc_7 The UN is a friggen joke.
