Name: Zacharie Manishimwe
Codename: Tanganyika
Gender: Male
Appearance: Zacharie stands at the height of 5'10", and is surprisingly thin and lanky; though the man is not devoid of muscle by any means, he doesn't cut the world's most imposing figure, something probably alleviated a bit by the advanced rifle he is usually carrying at his side. He appears to be somewhere in his thirties, with very dark skin and black hair cut fairly, though not extremely, short. He also has brown eyes. Zacharie wears his uniform as his job requires, but does not seem to be overly fond of wearing military clothing otherwise, despite carrying around his rifle.
Role: Ranking American Officer
Background: Third World Politician, Engineering Legend
Burundi is by practically every metric one of the poorest nations in the world, even among African nations, and many of its citizens live under squalid conditions, thanks to the repeated wars between Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities. For a time, this was very much true for Zacharie -- despite being part ofthe traditionally dominant Tutsi ethnicity, he grew up as a simple villager... and he bore witness to the horror and atrocity of the Burundian civil war, of massacre back and forth between Hutu and Tutsi.
Zacharie never fought in that civil war, mostly trying to keep his head down and not end up as a genocide victim, but one thing he learned to cultivate was that he was very very smart, having an instinctual and incredible knowledge for technology. His village's closely guarded secret (an advanced artifact of a personal weapon of unknown origin) helped him in this -- he had something to tinker with, and by the end of the Burundian civil war in 2005, he'd developed a crude but potent ability to work with advanced technology like that, one that he honed in that crude way until 2008, when a coup occurred and violently pro-Hutu dictator Césaire Ndilingiye came into power. He began to instigate attacks and initiate repression on the Tutsi minority, and one day a representative of a Tutsi political group within his village asked for his aid in helping it stop.
Later in 2008, an assassin armed with an futuristic ballistic gun blew Césaire Ndilingiye into pieces. Immediately there were retaliatory attacks against Tutsi, and the Burundian civil war was once again in full blast. The Tutsis had an engineering genius behind the scenes now, though, and even as Zacharie found a whole new level of resources with which to tinker and combine, he began to gain importance within the Tutsi political movement itself, and eventually he became a fairly key player, who was known to talk with the increasingly-megalomaniacal leader of the warring faction, Gerard Shyaka, and responsible for much of its military success thanks to his technology.
Zacharie was, for most of the war, able to convince himself that he was on the right side, that the Tutsi faction was simply defending themselves, and not stooping to the lows of the Hutus. But then in the fall of 2011 he personally ended up observing an attack on Hutu territory, being with the troops for engineering purposes, and the things he saw were nothing short of the atrocities he'd witnessed in his childhood. With the effectiveness of his weapons, maybe greater. Zacharie was immediately, terribly sickened by the realization of what exactly he had been helping to create -- and through the following year, he became instrumental in the process of ending the conflict, helping to shift the loyalties of Shyaka's followers and thusly decreasing the level of violence committed, blowing Shyaka away himself at a tipping point. Though Zacharie did not proceed to take control of the Tutsi faction himself, he remained an extremely influential voice within it as it ratcheted down, and with the political aid of the United States his efforts paid off with the Conference of Bujumbura, bringing a peace that has so far lasted to the wartorn country.
Thanks to his actions there, Zacharie is mostly only a mildly controversial figure -- those who know a bit more about the conflict, and many people in the region themselves tend to be aware and critical of his history as an arms researcher for a warlord, but he is generally known for a contribution to peace in that stage of his life. Zacharie himself knows better, too. He genuinely believed in what he was doing when he was ending the conflict, but he also knows that his creations directly contributed to a terrible amount of blood, horror, and suffering. So, after, the Bujumbura Conference, he could no longer stand to live in the country he felt he'd so failed, and he followed the American diplomats back to the United States, where he then immigrated.
He was, of course, a great asset for the United States. Ushered into military research (the field where his incredible talents lie), he was granted a research environment and resources that even his tenure as a powerful man in the Second Burundian Civil War did not come close to matching, and he flourished, reaching the point where he was even tapped to work on the weapon systems for the Sword of Justice.
It was after he realized that the JDF could begin a genocide against unpowered people and absolutely noone could stop them that, in his horror, he became a critic of the Sword of Justice and the JDF... and ended up in Operation Buckler, his engineering genius, his African contacts, and his position as a fairly high-level asset in the American military ensuring that he would become the ranking American officer aboard the HMS Illustrious.
(...whoops. Wanted to write out his backstory because it was coming together super naturally in my head, ended up kind of making it fuckhuge. Weird noted specifically that he did not ask for a backstory, I should note, and if his worldbuilding clashes with this it ain't the worldbuilding that gets tossed out.)
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Topic: (SG/OOC Thread) Project Buckler: You Run a Suicide Squad! (Read 9007 times)