Professional Youths

"You see that Russian delegate with the gray hair?" a 27-year-old Scandinavian confided to a reporter at the United Nations World Youth Assembly. "He was an oldtimer when I was at my first conference five years ago."

It was indeed old home week for many of the 638 delegates who traveled to Manhattan from 112 countries for what U Thant had billed as an "unprecedented worldwide meeting" of youth. Nearly a third of the "young people" were over 25; one owned up to being 47. Several sported the thinning hair and thickening waistlines that characterize the men who are known on the world conference circuit as "professional youths." So prominent were the pros, especially among the Communist delegations, that the organizers considered tossing out everyone who could not prove himself under 30. But youth conferences, apparently, are too important to be wasted on the young.

Commission Impossible. Thanks to their presence, things were tightly controlled. High-powered politicking by the well-oiled claque of East bloc veterans was so blatant at meetings of the Commission on Peace that angry Western delegates began calling it Commission Impossible. "Most of the people had no chance to speak at all," complained Pat Mapps, a black American delegate.

Blandly ignoring cries of "Shame!" and "Farce!" during an obviously phony election, the pros voted in a young Palestinian student named Fawaz Najia as the peace commission chairman. At the final session, which ended in uproar at 2:30 a.m., the wily Najia rammed through a resolution condemning the U.S. for a host of "rapacious" policies. What of some 70 other proposals that included a rebuke of the Soviets for "aggression" in the Middle East? There was, said Najia, "no time."

At the final session, an Israeli delegate vented his rage by storming to the rostrum and ripping Najia's report to shreds. The assembly's final report to the U.N. did, however, make a grudging attempt at impartiality: it balanced the demand for U.S. withdrawal from Indochina with a suggestion that the Soviets should lay off Czechoslovakia.

Guided Tour. For those who wanted to see just how the U.S. "exploits and oppresses its own people," American militants ran a bus tour of Harlem. The delegates rode in rapt silence as their guide pointed out drug addicts and berated the "white fascist pig establishment." One puzzled youth wanted to know where all the late-model automobiles came from. He was told that they belonged exclusively to black exploiters of blacks--pimps, pushers and similar parasites.

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