Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Department of State’s new Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, visited Kigali Sunday and Monday.
She met with her Rwandan government counterparts to discuss issues of concern in the Great Lakes region, specifically the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
She also visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center to pay her respects to the victims who perished in the 1994 genocide.
Her visit follows U.S. high level phone calls to the Rwandan government last week. Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield reiterated that the Peace, Security, and Cooperation Framework provides the best chance in decades to bring stability to the Great Lakes region through a comprehensive political and development process supported by the UN and the World Bank.
She also urged Framework signatories to engage directly in a political process to diplomatically de-escalate the situation and address the underlying causes of conflict in the region and their legitimate security concerns.
Following her two days in Kigali, the Assistant Secretary traveled on to Kinshasa. This visit to Rwanda and the DRC was her first official visit to a foreign nation as Assistant Secretary.
Her time at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center Monday was a moving experience because of her past connections to the country. “The visit to the Genocide Memorial Center was especially meaningful to me as I was last in Rwanda in April of 1994,” she said. “The United States remembers those whose lives were cut short by this tragedy.”
Thomas-Greenfield is a career Foreign Service Officer with more than 30 years of experience with the U.S. Department of State. She was sworn in as Assistant Secretary for African Affairs on August 6, 2013.
Overseas she has served in Jamaica, Nigeria, The Gambia, Kenya, Pakistan, Switzerland (at the U.S. Mission to the UN), and as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Liberia, where she served from 2008 to 2012.
In Washington she was the Director General of the Foreign Service 2012-2013 and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration 2004-2006 and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs 2006-2008.
Thomas-Greenfield’s visit comes before a visit scheduled for later this week by the United States’ newly-named Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo Russell Feingold.
He will be traveling with the U.N. Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region Mary Robinson and representatives from the European Union and African Union to discuss the situation in the Eastern DRC, among other issues.

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