Veteran BBC Africa correspondent Mark Doyle, who reported on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, died on Tuesday, September 22, at the age of 67. Doyle died after a short illness, BBC reported. The British journalist was best known for reporting on conflicts in Africa in the 1990s and 2000s. Doyle, who had joined the BBC in 1986, became its East Africa correspondent in 1993 and made his mark covering the Genocide a year later. For a while he was the only foreign journalist in Rwanda during the Genocide claimed over one million lives. As West Africa correspondent from 1997 to 2002, he reported on Sierra Leone's civil war and aftermath of Liberia's conflict. ALSO READ: Rwandan journalists ‘said no to hate media’ after Genocide In a 2014 article he wrote in tribute to Capt Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese UN peacekeeper who saved lives during the Genocide, Doyle described the horror that engulfed Rwanda on the night of April 6, 1994, when killings started in Kigali right after the downing of President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane. 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, Doyle recalled. He also said Diagne saved his life at an Interahamwe-manned roadblock in Nyamirambo. One militiaman man, who held a stick grenade, thought Doyle was Belgian, which would make him an enemy. 10 Belgian soldiers had recently been killed as the genocidal regime sought to prompt the withdrawal of the UN mission in Rwanda, which happened. I was terrified I was about to be killed, but Mbaye looked at the man, smiled, and cracked a joke, Doyle recalled. 'I’m the only Belgian in this car. See?' he said, pinching some of the jet-black Senegalese skin on his arm. 'Black Belgian!' The joke broke the tension of the moment. Mbaye then ordered him out of the way, the militiaman instinctively obeyed - and we drove on. He also reflected on the role of the media in the Genocide and how radio stations cheered the machete-wielding Interahamwe and called for the killings of Tutsi. Doyle wrote a chapter titled Reporting the Genocide in the 2007 book The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, edited by Allan Thompson. Following Doyle's death, BBC foreign editor Paul Danahar said he was a legendary figure, as well as a brilliant, brave, empathetic reporter. In 2004 Doyle won first prize in the UN Correspondents Association/UN Foundation Awards for his coverage of post-war Liberia. He became BBC World Affairs correspondent before retiring from the BBC in 2015
