On this day of May 31st 1994 marked the end of a Hero’s life.
Today I pay tribute to an African Hero less known to many. A hero who on this day in the year of 1994 was killed while going about what could be arguably be the most heroic deeds a soldier ever carried out solo and unarmed!
The good man’s name is Captain Mbaye Diagne and this was during the horrific Rwandan Genocide. It was at this time when Africans were busy looking the other way and the UN was busy arguing what constitutes a Genocide.
Captain Mbaye one of the soldiers in the UN peace keeping force was sent to Rwanda as a Millitary observer of the implementation of the Arusha Accord. A towering Senegalese with an ever-present toothy smile Mbaye a staunch Muslim is said to have risked his life and career to save thousands of Tutsis from being slaughtered by the Hutu extremists.
As a UN military observer Capt Mbaye and his fellow soldiers had limited mandate. Regulations barred them from actively involving themselves or taking any side in the conflict. In other words they were reduced to mere spectators in the mayhem.
The first act of bravery was when he( Capt Mbaye )saved children of the then just slain Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimina by hiding them and later ‘smuggling’ them to the Hotel des Mille Collines. During the fateful day of April 7th 1994 Madame Agathe’s Rwandan presidential guard turned on her and her husband and killed them in cold blood. The children had luckily been hidden in the neighbouring UNDP compound and had Capt Mbaye not smuggled them to safety, it was only a matter of time and they would have been discovered and butchered too. On the same day the 10 Belgian soldiers assigned to guard Madame Agathe were later castrated, choked with their own genitalia and shot dead!
To say Capt Mbaye was always putting his life in peril to save people is an understatement. It is not exactly known how many people he saved whether it was foreign journalists or just Tutsis and moderate Hutus who were just minutes away from their death. It is estimated he saved hundreds others place the figure at thousands. By this time the man had gone way out of his mandate as per the UN Millitary observer regulations. His superior the UNAMIR Force Commander Romeo Dallaire knew what Mbaye was doing was wrong but too disappointed by the UN for abandoning him and his troops, did not reprimand the good captain. BBC Correspondent based in Rwanda at that time one Mark Doyle said that when the acts of the Captain came to his knowledge him and other journalists decided not to highlight it lest they put Captain Mbaye’s life in danger. They let him ‘quietly ‘continue with the noble cause.
Captain Mbaye.
What seems to baffle many though is how he could pass through more than 20 roadblocks mounted by the Interahamwe militia just waiting to butcher the Tutsis who dared go through. This is attributed to his charm and the ability to strike rapport with the enemy within seconds. A few jokes , a flash of his big smile and an exchange of a few puffs of cigarette they would let him through. It is also said that he would occasionally go through the roadblocks by giving bribes of cigarettes and money. All this while he did not even have a baton on him since as an observer he was not allowed to carry arms. On each trip he had at least five people to ferry to safety.
The head of the UN Humanitarian Assistance Team in Rwanda Mr Gromo Alex described Mbaye ‘s activities as such:
‘’He had access to most of the areas … the military or gendarme or presidential guard. He covered all the territory, knew most of the people in the command structure. But fairly early on, we could see in this back room in the Amahoro hotel [that] large groups of people all of a sudden appeared and [the] next day were gone. We began to put together that Mbaye was bringing people from all over to the headquarters and then evacuating them or having them picked up and taken to safety elsewhere. And I don't even know the numbers of the people that he saved. But a lot of people know who he is. A lot of people were saved by him, and not just Rwandans but famous journalists. I think they were put in positions where their lives were pretty close to an end, and he stepped in and saved them. (...) ‘’
On May 31 May, Capt Mbaye was tragically killed when a mortar shell landed at the back his truck and shrapnel went through the back of his head. Ironically the mortar was aimed at a Rwandan Armed Forces checkpoint had been fired by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Forces. The Rwandan Patriotic Forces under Paul Kagame are the ones credited with stopping the Genocide in Rwanda.
It was a definite sad day at the UNAMIR Force Headquarters, They did not even have a body bag to put his remains. In a famous documentary the Ghosts of Rwanda , Gromo Alex Head of the UN Humanitarian Assistance broke down and cried as he described how they made a body bag out of a blue UNICEF tarpaulin and to him it was not the way they wanted to send off the hero. The man who use to give them hope with his charm and smile was no more.
Very few people today know about Capt Mbaye. Even fewer people know that his amateur video footage of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda is the one of the only video records shot during that time. BBC’s Mark Doyle paused the UNAMIR Force Commander Romeo Dallaire as written in his book -Shake Hands with the Devil- “ Can you imagine the blanket media coverage that a dead British or American peacekeeper of Mbaye’s bravery and stature would have received ? He got almost none. “
Do the Rwandans remember him ? Is there a road , a school or even a statue on the streets of Kigali built to commemorate this great soul ?Do Madame Agathe’s children right now nestled Switzerland Seventeen years later remember the man who snatched them from the jaws of death? Captain Mbaye was laid to rest in his home country of Senegal. He is survived by a wife and two children.
