Youth Assembly ‘Take-over’

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32352, 18 July 1970, Page 13

Youth Assembly ‘Take-over’

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) NEW YORK, July 17. The main body of the World Youth Assembly, its peace commission, has strongly attacked the policies of America, condemned Israel, and demanded freedom for the imprisoned Irish Roman Catholic civil rights leader, Miss Bernadette Devlin, “in the name of world youth.”

Its views are contained in a document to come before the assembly for approval in plenary session today. Attempts to revise the document when it was presented to the commission were brushed aside in a noisy session yesterday. Four rapporteurs appointed by the commission on the opening day of the assembly, from Cuba, East Germany, Guinea and Pakistan, prepared the commission’s recommendations on the basis of the assembly’s fiveday public debate. After the report had been approved by a show of hands and what appeared to be a majority of at least two to one, a number of European, African and Latin American delegates called a press conference to protest against what they described as the take-over of the assembly by militant Communists and their sympathisers. The peace commission repeatedly rejected attempts to condemn the Soviet Unionled invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The extent of the Communist seizure of control of the assembly was made fully apparent only with the pub-

lication today of the report of the peace commission, whose deliberations have often been attended this week by Leftist militants drawn from other commissions.

Under the assembly rules, participants in one commission may vote in any of the others.

The well-organised Communists are expected to push their recommendations through the plenary session today, and present these sentiments to the United Nations as the reflection of the views of world youth. One paragraph of the peace commission report expressed “the strongest indignation, protest and condemnation by world youth of American aggression in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia,” and declared “full solidarity with the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people and youth.” Another expressed solidarity with “the progressive forces in Northern Ireland." The document also demanded Israel’s immediate and unconditional withdrawal from occupied Arab lands, and condemned “the racialist regimes of South Africa and Portugal.”