How President Biden’s top Diplomat to UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield survived during the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda

Linda Thomas-Greenfield is an American diplomat who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the United States Department of State’s Bureau of African Affairs from 2013 to 2017. She is a senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington, D.C.

In 2012, Thomas-Greenfield became Chief of Staff of States Department and Director of Personnel between 2012 and 2013.

In 2013, she was appointed Deputy Secretary of State for Africa, where she focused on her country’s activities in sub-Saharan Africa in projects such as the fight against Ebola and more. After Trump took office, she was removed from office in 2017.

In November 2018 while giving a talk in Virginia, she returned to her life, from an early age, as she never had the opportunity to see educated people even in her childhood family.

Her mother had eight children, but she decided to raise eight others who did not have families in neighboring areas. She described how she grew up in a poor, discriminatory society, etc.

She later graduated and entered diplomacy. “It made me travel all over the world but in April 1994 I arrived in Kigali, Rwanda. And I remember that there was a Genocide in Rwanda in April 1994.”

In April 1994 she was sent to Rwanda on an official visit to assess refugee conditions, but two days after she arrived, the plane of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down, and the genocide broke out.

Six-feet tall and black, Thomas-Greenfield was mistaken for a Tutsi.

Hutu soldiers held a machine gun to her head, while she begged for her life, emphasizing her Louisiana accent: “I don’t have anything to do with this. I’m not a Rwandan. I’m an American.”

“I looked at the young man in the face and asked his name. I wanted him to know my name, because I wanted him to kill me so that he would know the name of the person he killed.”

She then watched as the soldiers killed a Tutsi gardener. A few days later, she was allowed to leave Rwanda.

In 2016 when she was the US Deputy Secretary of State for Africa, she praised Rwanda’s efforts to accommodate more than 70,000 Congolese and Burundian refugees fleeing the unrest that had intensified in their country.

In July of that year, she visited Rwanda, went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial to pay tribute to the innocents’ lives killed in 1994 Genocide against Tutsi, and said that the visit had great meaning for her.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield is the U.S Ambassador to UN as appointed by the U.S Elect President Joe Biden