About 50 representatives of 41 youth organizations—most of them affiliates of WFDY—from 33 countries attended the January 7 consultative meeting on the world youth festival. It was preceded by a two-day meeting of WFDY’s General Council, which also endorsed the proposal to organize the next international gathering of progressive youth in Venezuela.

The World Festival of Youth and Students draws together students, young workers, farmers, and other youth involved in protests against imperialist war, movements for national self-determination, and other social and political struggles. The last two festivals were held in Cuba in 1997 and in Algeria in 2001. They were marked by the political tone and character of groups and individuals engaged in popular struggles for national liberation, union organizing and other battles by workers resisting austerity drives by the bosses, fights by peasants for land, mobilizations demanding women’s equality, and progressive actions by students. The youth at these gatherings—about 12,000 in Cuba and nearly 7,000 in Algeria—came together to exchange experiences and improve their understanding of how to advance their struggles.

WFDY, the main initiator of these festivals that started half a century ago, was dominated in the past by youth groups affiliated to Communist Parties that looked to Moscow for political direction and sustenance. The festival movement was interrupted for eight years as the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. The international gatherings started anew on the initiative of communists in Cuba.

Each of the two dozen delegates who spoke at the January 7 meeting voiced their support for holding the next festival in the South American country.  
 
‘10,000 Cuban volunteers in Venezuela’
“Venezuela has the potential to become a center of resistance to imperialist intervention in Latin America,” said Otto Rivero, first secretary of the Union of Young Communists (UJC) of Cuba. Holding the festival there will be a strong answer by the progressive youth of the world to U.S. imperialism’s designs to pacify working people in Latin America by all means and prevent them from taking their destiny into their own hands, he added. Rivero pointed to the role of Cuban internationalists in Venezuela, especially the thousands of Cuban doctors offering their services in free neighborhood clinics in areas where workers and peasants have had little or no access to health care, as part of a program sponsored by the Venezuelan government called Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood). “Our 10,000 volunteer doctors and other internationalists now in that country will enthusiastically greet holding the festival in Venezuela,” Rivero said.

Over the last two years, Washington has intensified its efforts to oust the government of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez. Since his election in 1998, Chávez has drawn the wrath of the U.S. government and its backers in the Venezuelan ruling class for taking measures that cut into the prerogatives of big capital. These include an agrarian reform law and a bill strengthening state control over the country’s oil, gas, and other mineral resources that are part of the country’s national patrimony. Washington’s hostility has also been fueled by Venezuela’s closer economic and political ties with Cuba, including collaboration on Venezuela’s nationwide literacy campaign and the medical program.

With Washington’s support, the Venezuelan capitalist class has unsuccessfully tried to topple Chávez’s government twice in the last two years—through a short-lived military coup in April 2002 and an employers’ lockout a year ago. Each time, mass mobilizations by working people caused divisions in the military and pushed back the designs of the coup plotters. A third major confrontation is now brewing as the pro-imperialist opposition in the country is pushing for a referendum to recall the president.

“We thank you for your support and are happy of your decision to accept our offer,” Wikénfred Oliver of the Youth of the Fifth Republic (JVR) told participants in the January 7 meeting. He represented, along with David Velásquez of the Communist Youth of Venezuela, the youth organizations in that country that offered to host the 16th world youth festival there. The JVR is affiliated with the Fifth Republic Movement, Chávez’s party. “The Venezuelan people have dealt blows to the opposition of the wealthy who have carried out coup attempts and more recently acts of sabotage,” Oliver said. “Your actions to organize and build a youth festival in my country will help us in the struggle to confront imperialism.”

With support from Venezuela’s government, the prospective hosts said they have the facilities and resources to accommodate up to 20,000 youth.

“The festival is an act of solidarity, and international solidarity can have an impact on the struggle of the Venezuelan people against U.S. intervention,” said Mafhoud Salama, representing UJSARIO, the youth group of the Polisario Front, which is leading the national liberation struggle in Western Sahara. “We are at a critical point in the political situation in the world where movements of national liberation and all those trying to defend the interests of workers and peasants face an imperialist military offensive of a new kind,” Salama added.

“The anti-imperialist struggle of the Venezuelan people makes it important to host the festival there, and the parallels with Africa give us a good opportunity to build it in our own countries,” added Katabazi Emmy of the East Africa Youth Council, which is based in Uganda. “Cuban internationalist volunteers have served in many countries in Africa over the last decades, and are serving today in Venezuela.”

Organizing the festival in Venezuela won’t only be an act that can help push back U.S. designs for military intervention in Latin America, said Olympia Newton of the Young Socialists in the U.S. “It’s tied to the need to oppose the U.S.-led ‘war on terrorism’ worldwide—from Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, Syria, and north Korea.”

Shane McEvoy of the Young Communist League USA said that “the progressive movement in the U.S. knows of the pressures and attacks of our government in Venezuela, and will want to work to build a festival there.” He also stressed that “stopping Bush is the most important thing we can do for the Venezuelan people right now. It is the most important thing we can do for peace.”

The first International Preparatory Meeting for the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students will be held in early summer 2004, Madeira informed participants. That gathering will issue the formal call for the festival. “But no one should wait until then,” Madeira said. “Work can start now to spread the word and get many local, national, regional, and international youth organizations to begin building it.” National preparatory committees will begin to be formed in many countries by WFDY affiliates and other groups interested in building the festival.  
 
Discussion on Iraq war
During the WFDY General Council meeting, delegates discussed the U.S.-led war and occupation of Iraq and decided on a series of actions aimed at resisting imperialism’s drive to war and economic depression.

A wide range of opinions were expressed after the federation’s leadership presented a draft political resolution. The document stated, among other points: “WFDY demands the immediate end of the occupation of Iraq and respects the independent right of the Iraqi people to decide their own future as an independent and sovereign country. WFDY believes that the Iraqi people have full rights to fight against the foreign occupation. The action and role of the UN was completely passed over by the U.S. and its allies.”

A number of delegates praised the “Iraqi resistance.” The most outspoken were those from Syria, which had the largest delegation at the meeting after Cyprus. Ahmed Dabbas of the Democratic Socialist Youth Union of Syria urged WFDY to “salute and support the Iraqi resistance to occupation and stand for the unity of Iraq against American plans to divide the country.” This echoed the Syrian government’s position, which is adamantly opposed to any federal structure, let alone self-determination, for the Kurdish people in the region. The oppression of Kurds in Syria by the ruling class there lurks behind this stance.

Aristos Damianou of the National Democratic Youth Organization (EDON) of Cyprus proposed amending the resolution to call for an immediate transfer of the administration of Iraq to the United Nations.

Newton of the Young Socialists in the United States presented a different perspective. She argued that WFDY should not only oppose the occupation of Iraq by the Anglo-American imperialists, or the UN for that matter, but call for the unconditional withdrawal of all imperialist troops and other occupying forces from Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, the Balkans, Korea, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The intensifying rivalry between the major imperialist powers was also a topic of discussion. “With all the contradictions and interimperialist conflicts, the European Union (EU) has had a clear position in line with its imperialist interests and following U.S. policies,” stated the draft political resolution.

Most delegates said they agreed with this statement. A number of organizations represented at the meeting, however, have in practice sided with the bourgeoisie in their countries against other imperialist powers. EDON, for example, and AKEL, the Communist Party of Cyprus, with which it is politically affiliated, recently changed their position and now back entry of Cyprus into the EU. The theses adopted by EDON at its January 2-4 congress, which were distributed to delegates at the WFDY meetings, said that “there are separate positive elements in the EU, which should be made use of for the benefit of working people.” AKEL won the plurality of votes, 35 percent, in recent parliamentary elections in the Mediterranean island nation and is now part of a coalition government with capitalist parties.

Anna Van Dorn, representing the Young Socialists of New Zealand, described how Wellington came to be part of the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” that is occupying Iraq. “Washington has used this coalition, based in ‘new Europe,’ to deal further blows to its rivals in ‘old Europe,’ especially those in France and Germany, who are not following Washington’s lead quickly enough,” she said. “There is no united European Union. The only reason French and German imperialism didn’t back the U.S.-led assault on Iraq was because its timing and the degree of U.S. domination threatened their investments there and long-term strategic interests in the region. The imperialist assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan have everything to do with sharpening interimperialist competition and we must oppose the entire imperialist system and its wars.”

The WFDY General Council also approved two solidarity statements. One backed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in its effort to defend itself from attacks by Washington, Tokyo, and other imperialist powers, and supported Pyongyang’s right to develop nuclear weapons for self-defense. The second statement extended solidarity to coal miners in Utah fighting to organize a union, and to striking grocery workers in California.

The plan of action the federation adopted for 2004 includes a WFDY solidarity trip to Palestine March 5-12 and protest demonstrations and an “anti-NATO summit” planned in Istanbul, Turkey, in June to coincide with the next NATO summit there. At this gathering Washington plans to accelerate the transformation of the armed forces making up the U.S.-led NATO into a military alliance counter to the “France-dominated” EU.
 
 
Related article:
U.S. steps up offensive against Cuba, Venezuela
Charges ‘destabilization’ to prepare expanded intervention
Build youth festival in Venezuela!  
 
 
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