UNITED NATIONS: Double Whammy

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The 300th meeting of the Security Council last week may well have stirred envy in the narrow breast of "Evil-Eye" Fleegle. As readers of Cartoonist Al Capp's Li'L Abner know, Fleegle, a saturnine resident of Brooklyn, has eyes of compelling power. Mother Nature, in a misguided moment, endowed him with the ability to transmit visual whammies. A single whammy can stop a policeman in his tracks. Slightly stronger whammies will tame a gorilla or stun a herd of oxen. Rarely, only rarely, does Fleegle loose the lightning bolt of a double whammy, which is powerful enough to heat a city the size of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Last week at Lake Success, Dr. Jan Papanek, former Czech delegate to the U.N., told how the Russians were pressuring his country. All Czech envoys, "including the Ambassador to Washington," must make daily reports to the Soviet embassies, he declared, and every Czech ambassador must be "screened" by Moscow. Russia's Andrei Gromyko, soon to return to Moscow, denounced the charges as "sheer libel." When it was moved that the Council set up a subcommittee to investigate Russian pressures at the time of the Czech coup itself, Gromyko countered by threatening a double veto.

The Council knew what that meant. During his 26-month tenure as Soviet delegate to the Security Council, Gromyko used the plain, ordinary, unadulterated veto 18 times. But only twice before did he unleash the full, blinding power of the double veto, which stops discussion before it can even get started.

Like the double whammy, the double veto has elements of the supernatural. It begins when Russia vetoes a resolution on which, in the opinion of the majority, the veto does not apply. This forces the Council to take a vote on whether the veto applies or not. On this vote, however, the veto does count and therefore all debate is automatically ended.

In Li'l Abner, Fleegle's evil eye is usually thwarted by the overpowering goodness of Mammy Yokum's counter-whammy. But in all its meetings the Security Council has not been able to find an antidote for the Russian basilisk. This week, true to his promise, Gromyko double-vetoed the motion on Czechoslovakia.