The Youth Festival That Wasn’t

LASZLO TAUBINGER & STELLA MUSULIN

The overthrow of Ben Bella and the announcement a fortnight later that the Algiers-scheduled World Youth Festival would not be held this year must have come as a certain relief— unacknowledged to be sure—to the organizers of that same Festival and to the would-be hosts in Algiers. Things had not gone well at all in the preparatory stages of the massive extravaganza that would have brought 26,000 delegates from 110 countries to Algiers the end of July in what the Communist world hoped would be the biggest Hate-the-West manifestation by young people of all time. (The Festival was to have kicked off with a “Cuba Revolution Day.” A “volunteer corps” of the World Federation of Democratic Youth was to have been formed. Its objective: to support revolutionary activities in Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. The culmination would have been a spectacular condemnation of the government of South Africa. As planned, a “world law court” would have summoned President Verwoerd to appear before it. Since the organizers could be sure he would refuse, he would have been tried in absentia, his apartheid policy condemned, and a dummy burned in effigy.)

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Laszlo Taubinger

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Stella Musulin

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LASZLO TAUBINGER & STELLA MUSULIN

The overthrow of Ben Bella and the announcement a fortnight later that the Algiers-scheduled World Youth Festival would not be held this year must have come as a certain relief— unacknowledged to be sure—to the organizers of that same Festival and to the would-be hosts in Algiers. Things had not gone well at all in the preparatory stages of the massive extravaganza that would have brought 26,000 delegates from 110 countries to Algiers the end of July in what the Communist world hoped would be the biggest Hate-the-West manifestation by young people of all time. (The Festival was to have kicked off with a “Cuba Revolution Day.” A “volunteer corps” of the World Federation of Democratic Youth was to have been formed. Its objective: to support revolutionary activities in Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. The culmination would have been a spectacular condemnation of the government of South Africa. As planned, a “world law court” would have summoned President Verwoerd to appear before it. Since the organizers could be sure he would refuse, he would have been tried in absentia, his apartheid policy condemned, and a dummy burned in effigy.)