This photo supplied by Paramount Vantage shows
Angelina Jolie in a scene from 'A Mighty Heart.' Jolie and Brad Pitt started
Monday, Oct. 9, 2006, in Pune, India, shooting scenes from the film, in which
Jolie plays slain journalist Daniel Pearl's widow, Mariane. (AP Photo/Paramount
Vantage, Peter Mountain)
GENEVA - Angelina Jolie says it is shocking that refugees are being turned
into hate figures in rich countries in an attempt to win elections or sell
newspapers.
Even worse, the Academy Award-winning actress and United Nations goodwill
ambassador said, was that people in the West did not seem to care.
"It's a scandal, really, in such a rich world, that we are not even finding a
way to help feed refugee families properly," Jolie wrote in an op-ed piece
released this week in Refugees, a quarterly magazine published by the U.N.
refugee agency.
She said Europeans, who only six decades ago were confronted by 40 million
refugees in the aftermath of World War II, have turned their backs on victims of
tyrannical regimes. Jolie also criticized Americans and Australians for failing
to improve the situation of the many migrants who have died trying to emigrate
to their countries.
"We will put Band-Aids over the most gaping wounds because they look a bit
ugly," even as UNHCR battles to meet funding requirements for its annual
programs helping 20 million people, Jolie said.
"Agencies like UNHCR should not really have to struggle to scrape a few tens
of millions of dollars together to help rebuild shattered nations - like
Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia and south Sudan," Jolie said. "But we won't pay
for a full cure."
Jolie, who has made over 30 missions for the agency since becoming goodwill
ambassador in 2001, described her shock over a photo printed in an edition of
Refugees earlier this year capturing a couple bathing on a beach while
disregarding a black man washed ashore.
"They can't see the stark reality lying a few yards further up the beach,"
she wrote. "We are all- myself included - behaving like the couple sitting
under their umbrella on the beach, gazing studiously out to sea."
