This article is from U.N. Forum. It basically restated what Captain Mbaye Diange did during the Rwandan Genocide and how he did it and, after he was killed his family’s situation and what the government and U.N. react to it, including Captain Mbaye Diagne’s perspective of the world, his understanding of the world.
What my first and strongest reaction was to how the U.N. and the Senegalese government react to his death and how they treated his family that was left behind by Captain Mbaye Diagne. Neither the U.N. nor the Senegalese government helped, or compensated his family adequately. This man, he gave what he could to Rwanda, to the Tutsi people in Rwanda, to his own job, to the organization and his own government. He did everything he could to save the people in Rwanda, to complete his peacekeeping job while the others just wanted to go back to their country without any injury of themselves, not caring about the people that were killed around them. He gave everything to this place, this organization and this government, including his life. But yet when that happened, neither of the above compensated his family adequately. Neither of the above responded to this thing here fairly enough, as if they are still expecting more from him, from his family. While his kind widow gave the video camera he had during the genocide to media and let the world know about the heroes during the Rwanda Genocide, besides himself. Captain Mbaye Diagne recorded everything with his camera, every saving mission, except the ones of him self’s. Again he showed the world his selfless, and the world again didn’t respond to him enough. The world started asking from him on the very first day of the genocide. They ordered him to keep neutral while working for the U.N. as a peacekeeper, unarmed, he saved hundreds of lives, and yet, when he died, they couldn’t find a proper body bag for him, what’s more, they didn’t even compensated his family adequately. I don’t think it’s that they couldn’t, it’s just a matter of whether they want it or not, whether they care about him or not, whether they care about his family or not. Couldn’t they at least do something for his family while the only thing they did is telling the world that he was a hero?
“He was a hero”[1], they say, “He was the kind of person you meet once in a lifetime.”[2]
This interview is about Captain Mbaye Diagne. Mark Doyle, as a BBC World Service journalist, knew Captain Mbaye Diagne during the Rwandan Genocide.
Mark Doyle knew Captain Mbaye Diagne well in this case. He was one of the people who really worked and lived with Captain Mbaye, who actually supported him and care about him. Though Mark considered himself as one of Captain Mbaye’s friends, he didn’t know Captain Mbaye’s saving mission. The mission was called “the secret saving mission” for a reason.
Though Doyle wasn’t sure what Captain Diagne was doing exactly, he had heard some rumors too, and through what he has been through with Captain Diagne, he told the journalist what Captain Diagne was capable of. Through little jokes he could ease the tension between e and the Hutu killers at the checkpoints.
His calm and intelligence was precious during the time, plus his own sense of humor, he was able to go through dozens of checkpoints for hundreds and thousands of time while carrying Tutsis in his car.
He was just a normal soldier, who wanted to do something for the Tutsi people who were being killed, instead of standing there watching them being killed, pretending to be one of the “PEACE”keepers the U.N. sent. What’s the purpose of sending peacekeepers to Rwanda during the genocide while ordering them to stay neutral, not to attack anyone, and keeping them UNARMED? What’s the purpose of sending peacekeepers if they are not even able to keep peace without disobeying the headquarters’ orders?
Captain Mbaye Diagne was the real peacekeeper there, the one who really tried and did everything he could to do his job, to keep the peace there as much as he could in Rwanda.
[1] The Man Everyone Remembers: By Greg Barker, the producer of "Ghosts of Rwanda”, http://www.cafeafricana.com/Capt.%20Mbaye%20Diagne.html, May 5th, 2011
[2] The Man Everyone Remembers: By Greg Barker, the producer of "Ghosts of Rwanda”, http://www.cafeafricana.com/Capt.%20Mbaye%20Diagne.html, May 5th, 2011
Ghost of Rwanda, The forgotten angel of Rwanda: Capt Mbaye Diagne Vol.1
This part of the documentary was about how Captain Mbaye Diagne saved all those people. The video precisely records what Captain Mbaye Diagne did, and how he did it, including different people’s perspective of him.
The things that Captain Mbaye Diagne did were incredible and unbelievable. While everyone was trying to not get himself killed, Captain Mbaye Diagne was trying to do everything he could to save the others, the Tutsis that were in an extremely dangerous place. Saving the Tutsis could sure bring danger to Captain Mbaye himself, great deal of danger. What he did was so selfless. He didn’t care about himself much. Saving people seemed to be the only reason why he was there, in Rwanda what startled, surprised and impressed me was that he was smiling, he was smiling all the time in the video, whether he was driving in the car, maybe on another mission of saving people, or he was talking to his colleagues, maybe discussing a new way to save the Tutsis, he was always smiling. Sometimes he was so delightful he laughed out loud in front of the camera that was shooting, even when facing all the problems and killings and work he had. Maybe this was what he was holding onto and relying on while saving the people, transporting the Tutsis in his car to safe places. Maybe this was what he had and used to remain the relaxing and delightful relationship with the Hutu killers who guarded at dozens of checkpoints. His laughter, his jokes, his confidence, his bravery, his intelligence, and his hope, those were what he had and who he was, those were what made him a hero, a real life one.
Captain Mbaye Diagne (? -31st, May 1994) was a Senegalese Army officer and a United Nations military observer during the Genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He saved many lives simply by putting Tutsis in the back of his car and drove them through dozens of checkpoints to safe places. The people he saved also included the four children of the Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was killed the second day of the genocide with her husband, along with ten Belgium peacekeeper.
The Rwanda Genocide happened in 1994 from April 6th to mid July killed a massive amount of people, approximately 800000. This conflict was between the two sides of people in Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis. The minority Tutsi and the majority Hutu people are both Rwandans. The Tutsis have been ruling Rwanda for centuries and the Hutus just gained power in the rebellion of 1959-1962. In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), mostly contained by Tutsi, invaded the northern Rwanda in order to get rid of the Hutu government. The Rwandan Civil War began, and a lot of Hutus became one of the members of the Hutu power ideology. The Hutus thought that the Tutsis intended to enslave the Hutus, so the Hutus believe that they must do everything to resist the Tutsis’ intension. International pressure of the Hutu government made the government to a cease-fire in 1993.
The Assassination of Habyarimana in 1994 started the Rwanda Genocide, where and when the Hutus killed a lot of Tutsis and the pro-peace Hutus. Members of the Akazu planned the genocide. Akazu, a Hutu power group. Many Hutu civilians also joined massacre, killing a lot of the Tutsis, some even may be their own neighbors. The genocide was well organized by the government, and both the national government and the local military force, plus civil officials and media supported the genocide.
When Kofi Annan received the fax that acknowledged him that the genocide was possibly to happen, he didn’t think that was serious or anything. General Romeo Dallaire was present too, who was the United Nations Force Commander in Rwanda, and Kofi Annan ordered General Dallaire first, “Not to take any action,” and second, “to share the informant secrets with the Rwandan Government.”[1] Which he knew had strong ties to the Hutu extremists. The genocide happened, but nobody seemed to pay attention to it.
The genocide started by the assassination of the president of Rwanda Juvénal Habyarimana. The Hutu extremists, who had refused to negotiate with the TRPF (Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front) decided to kill moderate politicians. The next morning, 6th, April 1994, the Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and her husband were killed.
From the first few hours of the genocide “captain Mbaye Diange had ignored the orders of the United Nation headquarters to remain neutral and worked to save the lives of hundreds of Rwandans.”[2]
Later the morning that the prime minister was killed, Captain Mbaye heard rumors about the assassination of the prime minister from the people that was fleeing to the hotel that he stayed, Hôtel des Mille Collines. He drove to investigate and found the prime minister’s four children being hidden in the adjoining United Nations Development Programme housing compound. UNAMIR Force Commander Roméo Dallaire, who was trying to find out what had happened to the prime minister, discovered him later that morning. Dallaire told Mbaye to wait for UNAMIR armored personnel carriers to rescue the children and UNDP employees later that day, but the APCs never appeared. Mbaye eventually put the children in the back seat of his vehicle, covered them with blankets and made his way to the hotel[3] and hid the children in a closet.
Captain Mbaye Diagne had a quite unique personality. He was humorous, brave, selfless, and intelligent. Those are what he had and relied on while saving hundreds of Tutsis’ lives, the prime minister’s children’s lives the people who rode on his car’s lives, and many times, his own life. Through his own unique sense of humor and bravery, he was able to make extensive contacts among the military and militias, and relying on these contacts and his humorous and brave personality, he was able to get pass dozens and dozens of checkpoints where the Hutu killers with machetes guarded. Through his ability of defuse tense situation and occasionally of small bribes of cigarettes and money, he saved dozens and hundreds of lives.[4]The video on the right is about Captain Mbaye Diange saving the Tutsis' lives and the children of the Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana.
In the interview of Mark Doyle, a BBC World Service journalist, Mark Doyle talked about how Captain Mbaye saved Mark’s life and his own and several people’s around them from a grenade. They were in Captain Mbaye’s car going to see an orphanage. They got stop by the government militia, and the militiaman was holding a stick grenade. He leaned through the car window and was waving the grenade literally under the journalist’s nose, because the militiaman thought that the journalist was a Belgian. Mark Doyle said in the interview that “because at the time the Belgians were perceived by the government to be pro-rebel -- and so this militia man thought because I'm white and driving around -- and most of the white people who lived in Kigali at the time, the majority were Belgian -- he thought I was Belgian.”[5] So the militiaman asked Captain Mbaye, “Who's this guy? Is he Belgian?” Mark said “if Mbaye had said the wrong thing at that point, then I've no doubt that we'd have all been killed.”[6] What Captain Mbaye did was that he joked, “ ‘No, no -- I'm the Belgian. I'm the Belgian here, look -- black Belgian.’ And he broke the tension of the moment, and once the tension of the moment had been broken, he said, ‘No, no -- in fact, look, this guy is the BBC. Here's his badge. He's a BBC journalist, he's British, and he's got nothing to do with Belgian.’ And this kind of put the military man off guard a bit and he no longer wanted to kill us. And I just wonder[ed] if a Canadian soldier or a French soldier would have been able to do that, to joke with this guy and potentially save my life and the life of all the other people around who would have been killed by this stick grenade.”[7] Said Mark Doyle.
Another story was about how Captain Mbaye went through dozens of checkpoints with dozens of Tutsis in the backseats of his car. “On one occasion he found a group of 25 Tutsis hiding in a house in Nyamirambo, a Kigali neighborhood that was particularly dangerous. Capt. Mbaye ferried the Tutsis to the U.N. headquarters in groups of five -- on each trip passing through 23 militia checkpoints with a Jeep-load of Tutsis. Somehow, he convinced the killers to let these Tutsis live.”[8]
On May 31st, Capt. Mbaye was driving alone back to U.N. headquarters in Kigali when a random mortar shell, fired by the Rwandan Patriotic Front towards an extremist checkpoint, mistakenly landed next to his Jeep. He was killed instantly.[9] The video on the right is about the death of Captain Mbaye Diagne.
the moment of silence to show respect of Captain Mbaye Diagne, the "body bag" in the picture was made by UNICEF plastic sheeting and some tape as refered in the passage
In the interview with Gregory “Gromo” Alex, the head of U.N. Humanitarian Assistance Team in Rwanda, Gregory described the situation then. He said that they couldn’t find a body bag; the whole U.N. organization didn’t have a body bag. The Red Cross didn’t have a spared body bag either. So at the end they used some UNICEF plastic sheeting and some tape to make a body bag, but it didn’t fit perfectly. Gregory wasn’t content about that, he said in the interview that “and you don't want that for him. You want it to be like, you know, just laid out perfectly. So that when people look at him, they know that he was something great.”[10]
[1]The Ghost of Rwanda, documentary (2005) Documentary film directed by the PBS. Post by the Frontline: The Triumph of Evil website.
[2] Memories of Captain Mbaye Diagne, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/video/capt.html, last modified, Apr 30th, 2011
[3] Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil, Carroll & Graf: New York, 2003, ISBN 0-7867-1510-3, pp. 245-246, 268
[4] "Memories of Captain Mbaye Diagne": Mark Doyle, "Ghosts of Rwanda" program, Frontline, posted 1 April 2004
[5] Memories of Captain Mbaye Diagne, Mark Doyle, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/video/capt.html, last modified, April 30th, 2011
[6] Memories of Captain Mbaye Diagne, Mark Doyle, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/video/capt.html, last modified, April 30th, 2011
[7] Memories of Captain Mbaye Diagne, Mark Doyle, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/video/capt.html, last modified, April 30th, 2011
[8]The Man Everyone Remembers: By Greg Barker, the producer of "Ghosts of Rwanda”,http://www.cafeafricana.com/Capt.%20Mbaye%20Diagne.html, May 5th, 2011
[9]The Man Everyone Remembers: By Greg Barker, the producer of "Ghosts of Rwanda”,http://www.cafeafricana.com/Capt.%20Mbaye%20Diagne.html, May 5th, 2011
[10]Memories of Captain Mbaye Diagne, Gregory “Gromo” Alex, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/video/capt.html, last modified, April 30th, 2011
