Over the course of 100 days, from April 7 to July 1994, in Rwanda, over one million Tutsi were killed and hundreds of thousands of survivors were left orphaned, wounded, disabled, widowed, ill, and homeless.
The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi was one of the cruelest genocides in the 20th century. During the genocide, foreigners who were in Rwanda were evacuated by their embassies and the United Nations also evacuated US citizens who were in Rwanda by the time.
Although hundreds of foreigners were evacuated from Rwanda, there are others who stayed in Rwanda, stood firmly with the Tutsi and participated in the saving of lives of people whose lives were in extreme danger.
Capt Mbaye Diagne
Capt Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese peacekeeper, risked and lost his life in the process of saving many people during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Diagne is believed to have saved between 600 and 1,000 Rwandans before he was killed on the morning of May 31, 1994.
Mbaye was part of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) during the genocide. He would go meet the genocide perpetrators that were ready for mass murder at a given place and would plead with them not to kill the Tutsi.
In some instances he could even give the killers money so they can spare the Tutsi. He also saved the children of late Prime Minister Agathe Uwiringiyimana who was killed during the Genocide by the Interahamwe following her stand against the then ruling party’s divisive politics.
Carl Wilkens
In 1990, Carl Wilkens arrived in Rwanda as the country director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA).
Life was good, until 1994 when genocide broke out – prompting Wilkens to make one of the toughest decisions. The American Embassy approached Wilkens’ family and other U.S. citizens to inform them of an evacuation plan.
Wilkens supplied water with a truck to 80 to 400 orphans whose numbers were increasing overnight. Water was the main problem then. “I had a container of food but how can you cook without water? And people were thirsty and congested in a small house,” he said.
Jean Carbonare
The testimony of Jean Carbonare, on January 28, 1993, on France2 TV, was a poignant and urgent plea to the world to recognize the systematic organization behind the massacres of the Tutsi organized by the genocidal regime between 1991 and 1993.
Carbonare who was a human rights activist denounced the plan to kill the Tutsi and invited the world to act, especially his own country, France, which was a big ally of the government that was killing its own people.
His pleas, if listened to, could have changed the course of history and potentially prevented the massacres of a million people during the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi.
“It’s not just ethnic clashes,” Carbonare declared in the TV interview with Bruno Masure on France2. “It is an organized policy, a systematic extermination by the Government in Place,” he said.
Lt Gen (Rtd) Romeo Dallaire
The former head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, Lt Gen (Rtd) Romeo Dallaire, witnessed the Genocide, first hand, in 1994.
Dallaire, the author of ‘Shake Hands with the Devil,’ which talks about the failure of humanity in Rwanda, was the whistle-blowing commander of the UN Mission for Rwanda, whose alerts about an impending genocide by Juvenal Habyarima’s regime 30 years ago were tragically ignored by his bosses in New York, resulting in the slaughter of more than one million people.
He struggled to convince the international community to give him troop reinforcements to put an end to the Genocide. Instead, the force he had was significantly scaled down at the height of the Genocide.
“Stopping the Genocide was not seen as a priority, even though the world knew that this country was being wiped off the map under the watch of a UN peacekeeping mission,” Dallaire stated.
Lt Col (Rtd) Guillaume Ancel
Ancel was among 2,500 soldiers sent to Rwanda on June 22, 1994, in a French-led military operation in Rwanda, ‘Opération Turquoise,’ with a mandate of allegedly setting up a temporary humanitarian zone in Western Rwanda.
As per provided briefings, Ancel established that France was involved in the four-year war in Rwanda between the then genocidal Government and rebel RPF soldiers.
Ancel revealed that French soldiers in Rwanda took part in raids intended to demolish RPF Inkotanyi headquarters and supporting the Government’s plan to carry out genocide.
He narrated that the kinds of weapons they brought to Rwanda was evidence of their mission to engage into war than humanitarian assistance.
Amb Ibrahim Gambari
Ibrahim Gambari, currently the Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, was his country’s Permanent Representative to the UN when the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi broke out in Rwanda. He was also sitting in the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member and later chaired it.
As the debate ensued on whether to reduce the number of Peacekeepers, the Nigerian diplomat warned the United Nations Security Council that their inaction was going to make the world body a laughing stock.
Ambassador Karel Kovanda
Ambassador Karel Kovanda, as the Permanent Representative of the Czech Republic to the United Nations and President of the Security Council, worked tirelessly to bring the attention of the world to the genocide that was taking place in Rwanda.
Kovanda confronted the Security Council with the horrors of what was happening in Rwanda and pointed out that it was genocide being perpetrated against the Tutsi and not a civil war as was being portrayed by the then UN Secretary General.
