A Case of Dodocide

UNITED NATIONS In a set speech straight from the Communist handbook, Soviet Delegate Pavel Shakhov declared in the U.N. that "brutal" British colonizers have methodically oppressed and exploited the "indigenous inhabitants" of Mauritius, the Seychelles and St. Helena. Actually, replied Britain's Cecil Edward King last week, the situation "is even worse than the Soviet delegate realizes."

On Mauritius, said Delegate King, "I am afraid the original inhabitants were all liquidated within a few years of the arrival of the first explorers. They were birds of the species Dodo,* which is extinct and thus unable to press its claim to be granted independence on the basis of one bird, one vote." As for the Seychelles, King pointed out, "the original inhabitants were giant tortoises. Fortunately, these are not completely extinct, but they have shown no interest in political advance." On St. Helena, "the first explorers record the presence of pheasants, partridges and other birds, including the wide-awake or hack-backed tern, but alas, no indigenous inhabitants."

King did not deny Shakhov's charge that St. Helena's present-day population has an infant mortality rate of 33.6 per 1,000. Instead, he referred the Russian to the U.N. statistical yearbook, which lists several European nations as having even higher rates. Among them: "Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Rumania and the Soviet Union."

* Properly--and appropriately--known as Didus ineptus, the Dodo was an ungainly, turkeylike bird that could not fly. As U.S. Humorist Will Cuppy wrote: "The Dodo seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct, and that was all he was good for." Not quite. It was the far-from-dead Dodo in Alice in Wonderland who organized the Caucus-race.

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