Outgoing UN General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockman of Nicaragua said Monday he had been restrained by leading UN members in his efforts to improve the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, dpa reported. "My greatest frustration this year has been the Palestine situation," d'Escoto Brockman said in his final address to the 192- nation assembly before passing on the one-year presidency to Libyan diplomat Ali Treki. D'Escoto Brockman, a former Sandinista foreign minister in the 1980s in Nicaragua and a Maryknoll priest, said he was urged to exercise "caution" and to give the diplomatic process in the Middle East conflict more time to work. "Faced with this situation, I sincerely did not know what to do," he said. "I wanted to help Palestine, but those who should supposedly have been most interested denied their support for reasons of 'caution' that I was incapable of understanding." He said he found it "disgraceful" that influential members of the UN Security Council had shown "passivity and apparently indifference" on the Israeli blockade of Gaza in the past two years. He has criticized some western governments during his one-year tenure on issues ranging from the world economic and financial crisis to social injustice suffered by the poor. -- SPA
