A GOOD MAN IN RWANDA. Pt. 1

A Good Man in Rwanda

(By Mark Doyle, BBC News, 3 April 2014)

This is the story of the bravest man I have ever met.

 

I’ve covered many wars and seen many acts of courage. But for sheer grit and determination I’ve never known anyone to compare with Capt Mbaye Diagne, a United Nations peacekeeper in Rwanda.

I was there in 1994, when 800,000 people were killed in 100 days, and I returned to reconstruct the story of this remarkable, charismatic officer from the west African state of Senegal.

The country plunged into war and genocide on 6 April 1994, when the plane carrying the Rwandan president, a member of the majority Hutu population, was shot down. Everyone on board was killed. Within hours Hutu extremists seized power and a tidal wave of murder was unleashed against the minority Tutsi population, and anyone prepared to defend them.

The army came for Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana that first night.

As gunfire rang out, her five children, the youngest just three, were bundled through a chain link fence to be hidden in a neighbour’s house.

The children were cowering in the brick-built bungalow, occasionally peeping out of the window, when they spotted soldiers looking for their parents.

“There was more gunfire," says Marie-Christine, the prime minister's daughter, who was 15 at the time.

Then we heard the soldiers scream for joy. And after that there was nothing but an eerie silence.”

Agathe Uwilingiyimana was a moderate Hutu, not a Tutsi, but she was killed because she was ready to share power with them. Had the killers found the children they would have been slaughtered too.

Hours later, when UN soldiers arrived to pick up UN aid workers from the compound behind the prime minister’s residence, they discovered Marie-Christine and her brothers still hiding in the bungalow.

A fierce argument broke out about what to do with the children. It was not clear that the UN soldiers were authorised to move them, says Adama Daff, one of the aid workers, but “on humanitarian grounds we definitely could not leave them there”.

It was extremely dangerous to travel anywhere. Roadblocks manned by Hutu killers had already appeared, and the armoured personnel carriers which were supposed to have taken UN aid workers to safety had not shown up.

In the end, Daff says, it was decided that Capt Mbaye, an unarmed military observer, would take the children in his unarmoured car to the relative safety of the nearby UN-guarded Hotel des Mille Collines.

“He decided to load the kids up,” says Gen Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the small and poorly equipped UN force. “He hid them under a tarpaulin and just drove like stink.”

The gutsiness of that. There are no limits to describe how gutsy. It’s Victoria Cross-type action.”

They were the first of many people Mbaye took to the Hotel des Mille Collines - an unremarkable edifice of glass and concrete set on a hill overlooking the capital Kigali, but one of the few sanctuaries for Tutsis in the city.

Capt Mbaye Diagne was in his mid-30s, from a small village in northern Senegal, and a man of immense charm. Tall, gap-toothed and easygoing in Aviator sunglasses, his humour put people at their ease even in one of the darkest chapters of modern history.