Upside Down Indian Flag, Wrong Flag for Belgian Royalty and Other International Embarrassments

We all make mistakes. Even those who check everything twice and account for every second, it would seem! Diplomats and others in the foreign services are highly trained, very clued in to protocol and taught to be very very careful; but even these guys goof up at times. Is it any wonder that others do as well?

The flag goofup by Canada

In Canada, Belgian royalty was greeted not with their own country's flag, but that of neighbourning Germany’s. But then who can blame the Canadians! They didn’t tell the Belgians and Germans to have the same colours in their flags. So one has vertical stripes and the other as horizontal ones – who cares, right?

Upside down tricolour

That is our PM meeting the Japanese leader Shinzo Abe, with the Indian tricolour and the Japanese flag in the background. A nice diplomatic photo op; except that the tricolour was upside down! The commentator may not be very clued into world GK, but this was certainly a major faux pas.

When the president puked…

...Into Japanese PM Kiichi Miyazawa's lap! It was at a diplomatic banquet that President Bush attended and then proceeded to collapse into the lap of his host; according to some reports he also threw up into Miyazawa’s lap!

Eleven Jing Ping!

The Chinese premier’s name is Xi Jing Ping. But one doordarshan news anchor couldn’t be bothered to find out how to pronounce Xi and decided that the letters stood for the roman numerals for the number eleven! It became an international incident and the news reader was fired!

The many gaffes of Prince Philip

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburg was known for his many memorable gaffes; sometimes sexist, sometimes frankly racist. Visiting aborigines in Australia, he asked them "Do you still throw spears at each other?" When he met someone who returned from Papua New Guinea he asked "You managed not to get eaten then?"  To Briton’s living in China he said “If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty–eyed." And to describe Beijing he used the word “Ghastly”

Putting out an eternal flame

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder did something horribly embarrassing; something that, given the German record with respect to Jews, was doubly awful. He was visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, along with Israeli PM Ehud Barak when he accidentally doused the ‘eternal’ flame – you know the flame meant to burn in memory of the 6 million Jews that the Germans killed!

‘Tanned’ Obama

Calling a black person dark isn’t exactly politically correct, but Berlusconi said he was giving them a compliment when he called the Obamas ‘tanned’, others think it was a joke, some thought it was simply racist.

When north became south

It was known as the famous Korean flag blunder when the South Korean flag (that is the safe Korea without the fat megalomaniac leader who threatens world nuclear annihilation) was shown instead of the North Korean flag at the London Olympics. The North Korean team walked off in protest. I feel that if anyone should have taken offence it should have been the South Koreans – they are the sane ones! Yes, in spite of foisting Gangman Style on an unsuspecting world.

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