from Ken Crates Outside the great hall of the Mutualite in P,ris this Monday, 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 ever 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 hai 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 meeti-g 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 SNCC and Stokely Carmichael), and Ralph Schoenman who brought a personal message from Bertrand Russell. Other speakers included the Nobel prizewinner. Prof, Kastler, the secretary of the Moroccan UNFP, M. Abderamane Youssefi, Paul Verges, and our own 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 defence of the Vietnamese Revolution, and which lasted in all for some three hours, the rally broke up into a number of seminars, some of which contained well over 1,000 people, to discuss various aspects of aid to the Vietnamese peoples! struggle. (Among the participants in these seminars, besides those already named, were Andre Gorz, Jean Baby, Jean-Marie Vincent, John Baker from the Australian Trade Union movement, P, Vidal-Naquet, Claude Cadart, and spokesmen for the Provo movement in Holland, Francisco Juliao of Brazil, and from Algeria, Germany, Martinique, Italy, 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. So was the spokesman of the Vietnamese NLF, and so was 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 the same one struggle. "You won't get us to fight the people of Vietnam, not if hell 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. MM. Kastler's call for a UN neutral force of peacekeepers was received with mounting unease, turning into boos and catcalls. The Algerian spokesman was strongly heckled, with loud cries of “Liberez Ben Bella" and “Liberez Harbi", and protests "\Jhat about torture?" These turned into loud chanting at the end of his speech, But on the other
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- ‘*Six Hours for Vietnam" /continued
a most moving demonstration of solidarity took place when M. Youssefi, the Moroccan speaker and a colleague of murdered Beb Bella, 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 PSU and the numerous left groupings of Paris. Inspite of every appeal, the French Communist Party stayed aloof, and l'Humanite even went so far as to report a rightist attack upon the organisers' office, which took place the night before the Rally, without mentioning a word about the very demonstration which had aroused this antipathy on 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. * Footnote: "In six hours, 600 tons of bombs fell on Vietnamese hutments", read the advertisement for the meeting. Max Ernst contributed a specially executed painting for the poster,