UNITED NATIONS: Ritual Dance

U.N. debates on the Balkans have become as formalized as a ritual dance. Almost every non-Communist delegate considers the fact of Albanian and Bulgarian aid to the Greek guerrillas to be as fully proven as the law of gravity. Yet Soviet-bloc delegates insist blandly that it isn’t so. At Lake Success last week, after weeks of tedious arguments, Russia’s Andrei Vishinsky added a new twist to the choreography. He agreed that the rebels had received arms—but, he said, with a straight face, the arms had come from unnamed groups in France, Italy and Turkey, via “maritime channels.”

Spokesmen for Albania and Bulgaria had been invited to answer amply documented charges made by UNSCOB (U.N.’s Special Committee on the Balkans). Instead of answering, the Albanian representative attacked the Greek government, saying that it cherished “mad” territorial designs on his country and that it had committed no less than 1,565 “armed provocations.” Some of them, he added solemnly, were led by U.S. General James Van Fleet. Furthermore, said the Bulgarian spokesman, UNSCOB was a hand-picked group coached by the Greek “monarcho-fascists.”

The guerrillas had been defeated in Greece, but the West feared that new attacks might be launched from Albanian and Bulgarian soil. The U.S., Britain, China and Australia introduced a motion asking for an embargo on arms to Albania and Bulgaria, until they were certified by UNSCOB as having stopped all aid to Greek Communists. Last week the embargo motion was approved by the U.N. Assembly’s Political Committee, with only the Communist bloc (including Yugoslavia) voting against it.