May 09, 2006

First to vote

Describing events of December 9, 1948, these words:
    Then Dr Evatt put the resolution on the Genocide Convention to a vote. Somebody requested a roll call. The first to vote was ____. After her "yes" there was an endless number of "yeses." A storm of applause followed. I felt on my face the flashlight of cameras. ... The world was smiling and approving and I had only one word in answer to all that, "thanks."
Question 1: Who wrote this?

Question 2: Why was the world "smiling and approving"?

Question 3: Can you fill in the blank?

Usual rules: No Google/Wiki.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

um.
india.
raphael lemkin.
the world smiled because the un general assembly had outlawed genocide.

superb book.
have you read war in a time of peace (david halberstam)? also try philip gourevitch's "we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families"

Dilip D'Souza said...

Sorry for late reply, rajshekhar! Indeed: that book. Haven't read Halberstam, but I have Gourevitch's book and read it. Greatly disturbing.

Anonymous said...

hey,
incidentally, jared diamond has an ecological take on rwanda. in 'collapse', he says that the war wasn't as much between the hutus and the tutsis as between the landed and the landless.

the halberstam book is awesome. he studies US foreign policy after the cold war. bush had been voted out (the stigmata of being a foreign policy prez, of ignoring america, kind of claimed him). clinton was new to foreign policy and not terribly interested. and then, boom, two massive genocides in rwanda and bosnia, with the us completely unprepared for them. the book is a great look at the dynamics that shaped us foreign policy during this period.

mercifully, 'war in a time of peace' is one of the few halberstams that is easily available in india.

the gourevitch book itself takes genocide reportage to a very high level. the discussions with kagame on how to put the nation back together were superb.