RALLY IN PARIS BACKS WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL
By Ken Coates
Outside the great hall of the Mutualité in Paris November 28, thousands of young people were milling around every entrance. The hall was full, jammed with at least 6,000 people, standing in every corridor, craning their necks over the stairways. Once you were in, it was impossible to move, and quite impossible to get out through the seething thousands who were straining to get in. Altogether, perhaps 10,000, perhaps 15,000 had mustered.
The occasion was not a visit from the Beatles. It was altogether more serious: a rally, "Six Hours for Vietnam,"* organised under the honorary presidency of Bertrand Russell, at which, alongside other eminent spokesmen of the independent left in France, appeared a whole galaxy of international figures, centred around a group of members of the War Crimes Tribunal.
The meeting was chaired by Laurent Schwartz, himself a member of the tribunal, and amongst his colleagues speaking were Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Dedijer, Dave Dellinger, Courtland Cox (representing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Stokely Carmichael), and Ralph Schoenman, who brought a personal message from Bertrand Russell.
Other speakers included the Nobel prizewinner, Professor Alfred Kastler; the secretary of the Moroccan Union Nationale des Forces Populaires, Abderamane Youssefi; Paul Vergés, leader of the independence movement in Retinion; and Lawrence Daly, secretary of the Scottish Miners' Union.
The meeting was big in every sense of the word. After a plenary session, which included a film in which Fidel Castro spoke in defense of the Vietnamese Revolution and which lasted in all for some three hours, the rally broke up into a number of seninars, some of which contained well over 1,000 people, to discuss various aspects of aid to the Vietnamese people's struggle.
Among the participants in these seminars, besides those already named, were André Gorz, Jean Baby, Jean-Marie Vincent, John Baker from the Australian trade-union movement, P. Vidal-Naquet, Claude Cadart, the Brazilian peasant leader Francisco Juliao, spokesmen for various movements in Algeria, Germany, Martinique, Italy, Holland and, of course, Vietnam itself.
But with all its vast size and marathon organisation, the thing that was most inspiring about the rally was its enormous enthusiasm. Time and again the youthful audience cheered militant speakers to the echo.
Sartre, who went out of his way to appeal on behalf of the Peruvian revolutionary, Hugo Blanco, who is in imminent danger of being judicially murdered in prison, was given a standing ovation.
[The November 20 Le Monde reported him as saying, "We want peace in Vietnam, but not just any kind of peace. Peace must consist of recognition of the independence and sovereignty of Vietnam. But we don't want peace solely because of moral reasons. Morality is not a sufficient justification. Our theme, the themes of our struggle, must be political... This is the way we must show our solidarity with the Vietnamese people. Their struggle is our struggle. It is our struggle against American hegemony, against American imperialism." Sartre ended by declaring, "A defeat for the Vietnamese people would be a political defeat for us, a defeat for all the free peoples. Because Vietnam is fighting for us."]
Similar ovations were given the spokesman of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, and Dave Dellinger, who appealed for aid to the American people -- not of money ("We've got too much of that already," he said.) but of solidarity in the struggle for peace.
Courtland Cox, who has been working in the field for SNCC, in the heart. of the most bitterly racialist areas of the southern states, said that the oppression of the black people at home in the USA, and of the Vietnamese people abroad, were part of one and the same struggle. "You won't get us to fight the people of Vietnam; not if hell
*"In six hours, 600 tons of bombs fell on Vietnamese huts," read the advertisement for the meeting. Max Ernst contributed a specially executed painting for the poster.
freezes over," he said. "We are brothers."
Lawrence Daly also received deafening applause when he put the case for solidarity with the Vietnamese people and described the struggle in Britain.
Not every speech was received so warmly. Kastler's call for a United Nations neutral force of peace-keepers was received with mounting unease, turning into boos and catcalls.
The Algerian spokesman, Mahmoud Guennez, was strongly heckled with loud cries of "Free Ben Bella" and "Free Harbi," and protests, "What about torture?" These turned into loud chanting at the end of his speech.
But on the other hand a most moving demonstration of solidarity took place when Abderamane Youssefi, the Moroccan speaker and a colleague of the murdered Ben Barka, took the rostrum.
The remarkable thing about the whole meeting is the way in which it was assembled entirely by the independent socialist forces, the Parti Socialiste Unifié and the nunerous left groupings of Paris. In spite of every appeal, the French Communist party stayed aloof, and 1'Humanité, the official CP daily, even went so far as to report a rightist attack upon the organisers' officer, which took place the night before the rally, without mentioning a word about the very demonstration which had aroused this hostile action from the right. But this remote attitude will not be tenable for very much longer, if the response to this rally is anything to go by.