Youthful Emissaries Sought for Worldwide Peace Mission

Wanted: 50 peace-loving children, each from a different country; must be intelligent, should speak English, be between the ages of 10-13 and willing to travel.

Apply to: Peter Georgi, executive director of the Children’s Peace Foundation, a nonprofit Santa Monica organization, which is planning an unusual six-nation youth peace tour this summer.

The invitation was issued Thursday in Beverly Hills as Georgi explained his goal to take the youth group on a “Children’s Peace Journey” to Moscow, Peking, New Delhi, London, Washington and the Vatican.

If the group raises the necessary $7 million from businesses and individuals, Georgi said, the children will be received late in June by six of the world’s most influential leaders--including President Reagan, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II.

Escorting the children on their month-long tour will be former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali.

“Boxing was a means to get popular, but my main goal was to do God’s work--something spiritual,” Ali said Thursday, explaining that the trip will be a way to address the world’s problems through the eyes of the children.

The journey, Georgi said, is inspired by the spirit of Samantha Smith, the Maine schoolgirl who made headlines in 1983 after being invited by the late Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to tour the Soviet Union. Smith died in a plane crash in August, 1985.

Specifically, the group hopes to have the heads of state declare their intentions to actively seek a state of world peace by the year 2000, Georgi said.

Included in that declaration would be a commitment that no country authorizes a first-strike nuclear attack and that all countries work toward the elimination of hunger, prejudice and illiteracy.

Georgi, a producer of movie and television projects, is also involved in international finance and real estate. The Santa Monica resident first thought of the project three years ago.

The children will be selected in a number of ways, ranging from national essay writing contests to searches around the world by the Peace Journey’s steering committee. Political ideology is not a criterion for selection, Georgi said, but the hopeful ambassadors should speak English.

“We don’t want to be perceived as instilling in the kids on the journey a certain message or belief,” Georgi said. “We don’t want to put words in their mouths.”