Geeta Pasi, a career foreign service diplomat, has been nominated by President Barack Obama, as the next US ambassador to Chad. The Indian-American Pasi, who served as US Ambassador to Djibouti from 2011 to 2014, is a career member of the Foreign Service, Class of Minister-Counsellor. She is at present the Director of the Office of Career Development and Assignments in the Bureau of Human Resources at the Department of State.
Pasi’s nomination as the next US envoy to the central African nation of Chad came along with several other appointments to a key administration post, from the State Department. “I am pleased to announce that these experienced and committed individuals have decided to serve our country. I look forward to working with them,” Obama said in a statement issued by the White House.
Pasi was also the Director of the Office of East African Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs from 2009 to 2011, Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Dhaka, from 2006 to 2009, and Deputy Principal Officer at the US Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany from 2003 to 2006.
Since joining the Foreign Service in 1988, Pasi has also served at posts in Cameroon, Ghana, India, and Romania. Pasi received her BA from Duke University and an MA in French Studies from New York University.
Chad, home to over 200 different ethnic and linguistic groups, with Arabic and French as the official languages, and having Islam and Christianity as the most widely practiced religions, is a landlocked country in northern Central Africa. Since 2003, the Darfur crisis in Sudan has spilt over the border and destabilized the nation, with hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees living in and around camps in eastern Chad.
