Mbaye Diagne

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Captain Mbaye Diagne was a Senegalese Army captain and a member of UNAMIR during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He is credited with saving innumerable lives during his time in Rwanda.

A devout Muslim, Mbaye was one of nine children from a poor family on the outskirts of Dakar. He was the first in his family to go to college. After graduating from the University of Dakar, he joined the army and worked his way up through the ranks and was later attached to the United Nations peacekeeping battalion sent to Kigali.

Captain Mbaye was stationed at the Hotel des Milles Collines depicted in the movie Hotel Rwanda. From literally the first hours of the genocide, Capt. Mbaye ignored the Rules of engagement of the United Nations not to intervene, and secretly began efforts to save the lives of potential victims of the genocide.

On the morning of 7 April 1994, he rescued the children of the moderate Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana who was assassinated by the presidential guards assigned to protect her. The Prime Minister's compound was also protected by peacekeepers from Belgium and Ghana. The presidential guards forced the peacekeepers to surrender their weapons. The prime minister's husband and ten Belgian peacekeepers were also murdered.

In the days and weeks that followed, Mbaye became a legend among U.N. forces in Kigali. He continued his solo rescue missions, charming his way past checkpoints full of killers. 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 UN 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. It is now widely believed that Capt. Mbaye personally saved hundreds of Rwandan lives.

On May 31, 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, landed next to his Jeep. He was killed instantly.

UNAMIR Force Commander Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire wrote Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda: "As one of his fellow MILOBs said: 'He was the bravest of all'. The BBC's Mark Doyle who considered Diagne a friend, recently wrote to me, "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."

Mbaye is also responsible for his amateur video footage of the United Nations peacekeepers in Rwanda during the genocide, and serves as one of the only video records during that time. It has been widely hailed as "humorous, poignant and very human^[1]." The footage was used in the 2004 PBS Frontline documentary, Ghosts of Rwanda.

After Mbaye's death, he was buried in Senegal with full military honors. He was survived by a wife and two children. One of his closest friends -- Lt. Col. Babacar Faye, another Senegalese officer in Kigali -- found his videotape and later gave it to Capt. Mbaye's family in Dakar. Lt. Col. Faye and Capt. Mbaye's widow made the tape available to FRONTLINE so that the memory of this remarkable soldier and hero can live on.