Brazil's President Lula says UN has 'stopped working'

KUALA LUMPUR: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took a swipe Saturday at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, saying they “stopped working” and failed to protect Gaza’s war victims.

Lula was speaking after meeting Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, ahead of a major regional summit where the Brazilian leader would likely meet US President Donald Trump.

“Who can accept the genocide that has been going on in the Gaza Strip for so long?” Lula told reporters after the bilateral meeting to deepen ties between the two nations.

“The multilateral institutions that were created to try to prevent these things from happening have stopped working. Today, the UN Security Council and the UN no longer function,” Lula said.

Lula also appeared to take a swipe at Trump, saying “for a leader, walking with their head held high is more important than a Nobel Prize.”

Trump departed Washington Friday for Asia and high-stakes talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea on Thursday, the last day of his trip.

But first, the US president is expected to witness the signing of a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia on Sunday, which he — in part — helped to broker.

The White House lashed out this month at the Norwegian Nobel Committee after it awarded the peace prize to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and overlooked Trump.

Since returning to the White House for his second term in January, Trump had repeatedly insisted that he deserved the Nobel for his role in resolving numerous conflicts — a claim observers say is broadly exaggerated.

Meanwhile, Trump and Lula have begun to patch up their differences after months of bad blood over the trial and conviction of Trump’s ally, the far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

Trump has instituted a 50-percent tariff on many Brazilian products and imposed sanctions on several top officials, including a top Supreme Court judge, to punish Brazil for what he termed a “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro.

Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced Bolsonaro in September to 27 years in prison for his role in a botched coup bid after his 2022 election loss to Lula.

But relations between Trump and Lula began to thaw when the two 79-year-old leaders had a brief meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September.

They then spoke by phone on October 6 and first raised the possibility of meeting at the ASEAN summit.