Stefan Steć (20 November 1964 in Warsaw29 September 2005 in The Hague) was a major of the Polish Armed Forces. In 1994, he served as a peacekeeper in the UNAMIR forces in Rwanda under general Roméo Dallaire. For his dedication in saving lives during Rwandan genocide at the risk to his own, he was awarded the Cross of Merit for Bravery by Polish President Lech Wałęsa. He died at the age of 40 due to complications from posttraumatic stress disorder. Youth and service in UNTAC Stefan Steć began his studies in 1982 at the Warsaw Military University of Technology, but then volunteered for service in Polish peacekeeping UN forces and completed training at the Polish peacekeeping centre in Kielce-Bukówka. On his first UN mission he was assigned in 1992 to UNTAC forces at Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. The goal of the mission was to supervise the first Cambodia parliamentary election. Poland provided a contingent in the size of the battalion containing engineering and logistic units repairing roads and bridges and providing operational units with water, food and fuel. The mission ended in September 1993. Service in UNAMIR during the Rwandan genocide His next mission was small and ill-equipped UNAMIR-1 mission intended to oversee a transition from dictatorship to democracy in Rwanda and described by optimistic politicians as "classic". Only five Polish officers and cadets, mostly from finished UNTAC mission in Cambodia served in the UNAMIR mission that lasted from October 1993 till March 1996. They arrived in Kigali in November and December 1993 and their task was to prepare plans and organization of logistic support for the UNAMIR-1. Upon arrival Steć noticed however that the other UN soldiers referred to the mission as a "Mission Impossible" due to the racism, the Hutu Power militia and the human rights abuses. "It felt as though we were sitting on a barrel of gunpowder, waiting for a spark. (...) genocide hung in the air", and "the international community was playing for time, waiting for some final solution to the Rwandan problem". But no one could ever have imagined the scale of what was to come. When the genocide in Rwanda began on April 6, 1994, Steć was one of the first UN officers (with Polish Major Marek Pazik, Canadian Major Brent Beardsley and a three-man Bangladesh crew) who, called upon by two other Polish UNAMIR officers, Majors Jerzy Mączka and Ryszard