Shiloh’s Scare

lila , lilo an idiot lunatic who don’t hv money, power and byuti like the jolliepitt , so she’s here monkeying around with so much boling jealousy. she also hv a major BRAINDA-mage. now change tht monkey name, tht’s all ur good for.did u waxed ur ear? , brushed ur smelly rotten teeth? and washed ur pik-pik?

Angelina Jolie highlights humanitarian crisis during Syria and Iraq visits

DAMASCUS, Syria, August 28 (UNHCR) – UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie has visited Iraq and Syria to see first-hand the plight of hundreds of thousands of families uprooted by the conflict in Iraq.

The UN refugee agency estimates more than 4. 2 million Iraqis have left their homes – 2 million to neighbouring states and another 2.2 million displaced inside Iraq.

Yesterday in Damascus, Jolie visited a UNHCR registration centre and spent hours talking to Iraqi refugees in their homes. Today, she crossed into Iraq to visit 1,200 refugees trapped in a makeshift camp at the border, unable to flee Iraq, and later watched scores of Iraqis crossing into Syria at a border checkpoint.

As a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, Jolie said she would leave politics to others while focusing on the region’s huge humanitarian needs.

“I have come to Syria and Iraq to help draw attention to this humanitarian crisis and to urge governments to increase their support for UNHCR and its partners,” Jolie said. “My sole purpose in both countries is to highlight the humanitarian plight of those uprooted by the war in Iraq.”

After talking with some of the stranded refugees at Iraq’s Al Waleed camp on Tuesday, Jolie said: “it is absolutely essential that the ongoing debate about Iraq’s future includes plans for addressing the enormous humanitarian consequences these people face.”

While in Iraq, she separated from UNHCR to visit privately with US troops and other Multi-National Forces based in the area.

Jolie arrived in Syria on Monday. In Damascus, she met some of the thousands of Iraqi refugees registering with UNHCR, nearly one-quarter of whom are victims of violence and torture. Tens of thousands are without jobs, and many young people are in danger of losing out on an education and a future. She recognized Syria for its open borders and generosity to Iraqis.

In late July, UNHCR and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) launched a joint US$129 million education appeal aimed at getting 155,000 young Iraqi refugees throughout the Middle East back into school. The United States announced Tuesday that it will contribute US$30 million to the appeal.

Angelina Jolie visits camp in Chad to assess situation for Darfur refugees

BAHAI, Chad, February 27 (UNHCR) – UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie on Tuesday completed a two-day mission to a refugee camp in eastern Chad which enabled her to assess how the security situation has deteriorated for Sudanese refugees since her last visit to Chad three years ago.

Jolie, who visited both Chad and neighbouring Sudan’s Darfur region with UNHCR in 2004, said she was struck by the sense of hope she encountered at the Oure-Cassoni camp near this town and by the widespread desire for peace-keepers to be deployed in Chad.

She also reflected on the hardship and suffering she had seen at the camp, which is located less than five kilometres from the border with Sudan. “It’s always hard to see decent people, families, living in such difficult conditions,” she said. “What is most upsetting is how long it is taking the international community to answer this crisis,” Jolie added.

The award-winning actress had to travel through a sandstorm on Monday to reach the Oure-Cassoni camp, which with a refugee population of more than 26,000 is the northernmost of 12 UNHCR-run camps in eastern Chad housing more than 230,000 refugees from Sudan’s troubled Darfur region.

She was greeted at one of the camp’s many primary schools by singing children as the desert wind whipped against the plastic sheeting serving as the structure’s roof and walls. The encroaching sands and storms make their hard life even tougher, with many of the tents and mud-brick houses partially or completely buried. Wood for cooking and heat is scarce in the region, and competition for the resource causes friction between the refugee and local populations.

Refugee women are sometimes sexually and physically abused while out collecting the precious scraps of firewood beyond the protection of police provided by the Chadian government to help ensure refugee security.

At the school, Jolie listened to children’s tales of daily life, their concerns and their hopes of one day returning to their homes in Darfur. The room was filled with laughter as she and the children took turns drawing for each other. She later visited mentally ill refugees.

On Tuesday, Jolie visited a man-made reservoir that feeds the camp with water, but which is now almost empty following disappointing rains last year. Its shrinking reserves are a matter of concern for the refugees and UNHCR.

She then sat down with a group of women and discussed their desire for access to income-generating activities as well as their longing to return home. But the women, who were preparing celebrations for International Women’s Day on March 8, said it was still not safe enough across the border and many of the refugees she spoke to supported calls for a peace-keeping force in Chad.

In a report last week to the United Nations Security Council, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proposed sending a multi-dimensional peace-keeping mission to Chad to protect civilians and deter cross-border attacks.

The refugees Jolie talked to also drew comfort from recent radio reports saying that the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) had told the Security Council it had credible evidence of grave crimes against humanity committed in Darfur.

“Today, many refugees seemed to have a new sense of hope, and they want to see those guilty brought to trial . . . In order to feel safe enough to return home, these people said they would need to know that the men who attacked them had been stripped of their weapons,” Jolie said. “This is a very important day for international justice. The decisions of the ICC could make a big difference in the lives of these women and their children.”

Jolie had high praise for the UNHCR staff and NGO workers that she met in the camp. “Years into this situation, now finding themselves coming under attack, humanitarian workers’ spirits are unbroken,” she said.

There are more than 230,000 refugees from Sudan in eastern Chad, while some 46,000 refugees from the Central African Republic have found shelter in southern Chad. In addition to these refugees, close to 120,000 Chadians are displaced in the eastern region of their own country.

By Matthew Conway
In Bahai, Chad

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/45e4603e2.html

Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie applauds courage of refugees in India

NEW DELHI, India, November 6 (UNHCR) – On a weekend visit to refugees, UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie met Afghan and Burmese women who told her how they fled persecution in their homelands and found safety in India.

Relaxed and informal, dressed in jeans and a UNHCR tee shirt, Jolie also sat down on the floor to play with refugee children, commiserated with a hard-working single mother and chatted with teenagers about the joys and challenges of learning a foreign language.

“I am grateful to the refugee families who spent time with me and shared their stories,” Jolie said. “They are remarkable, courageous people.”

On Saturday, the actress visited the UNHCR Women’s Protection Clinic in west Delhi, a place where refugee women from Myanmar can come and air their problems in a safe environment.

Interviews at the clinic also enable UNHCR to better help the women – by getting them medical care, or arranging education for their children, for example. Longer term, many of the women are scheduled to be resettled in countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United States. Many of the refugees are from the Chin minority, Christians in officially-Buddhist Myanmar.

Writing notes in a thick notebook, Jolie listened attentively as Burmese refugee women told her that they cannot return to their country as long as the military regime remains in power. While she talked to the refugees, her five-year-old son Maddox played on the floor with Burmese children, overcoming any language barrier with an enthusiastic contest of spinning tops.

“It’s very upsetting to hear about the persecution the refugees have endured,” Jolie said. After a conversation with two Burmese women, one shyly told Jolie: “You look like an actress.” Added the second one: “Are you a film star?”

“That’s why I am in India, making a film,” Jolie replied, “but I came up to Delhi just to visit with you. I am honoured to be able to meet you. You are very strong women. You are amazing.”

The Afghan and Burmese women she met were among the 11,500 refugees in the Indian capital who are directly under the care of the UN refugee agency.

In the crowded narrow streets near the centre, Jolie slipped off her flip-flops and settled down on the wooden bed in a one-room apartment her Burmese refugee host shares with her three children. The woman, whose husband was arrested in Burma, fled to India alone with her young children. She cannot work here, she said, because she has her hands full taking care of the children, two of whom were at her side as she talked.

“That’s the hardest work,” said Jolie, who has three children of her own. “It must be very difficult for you to raise three small children in a foreign country.”

Jolie also visited Khalsa Diwan Welfare Society, an organisation run by and for Sikh Afghan refugees in west Delhi, where she dropped in on tailoring, music and English classes. Many of the Afghan Sikhs, who were a persecuted minority in their own country, have been in India for nearly three decades; most of the young refugees Jolie met were born in India and have never seen Afghanistan.

Chatting with a 15-year-old boy who said he loves computers, Jolie joked: “I am terrible with computers.” In an English class, Jolie, who said she has a special interest in Afghan refugees and would like to visit the country one day when it is peaceful, asked the students to teach her a few words in their mother tongue and praised their command of three languages.

Later she said it was tragic these Afghan refugees – who number 9,500 in New Delhi – had languished in exile for so many years. “We often focus on refugee emergencies, but we forget that there are millions of refugees around the world who spend years, even decades, outside their countries,” she said. “The international community really must work harder to find solutions for these forgotten urban refugees.”

On Sunday, Jolie met Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma, and also prominent members of Indian civil society, including academics and lawyers. She thanked both the people and government of India for “their longstanding hospitality to refugees” and for an “open-door policy” to refugees displaced by recent fighting in Sri Lanka.

In addition to the 11,500 refugees cared for by the UN refugee agency directly, India is also home to about 110,000 Tibetan refugees and more than 100,000 refugees from Sri Lanka who are looked after by the Indian government. Since violence flared on the island state in April this year, more than 18,000 Sri Lankans have sought refuge in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state.

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/454f05d62.html

Goodwill Ambassador Jolie sees urgency of more aid in Pakistan

JABEL SHAROON, Pakistan, Nov 28 (UNHCR) – UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie peered through the helicopter window at mile after mile of destroyed houses, and at the meagre possessions of poor Pakistanis buried in rubble strewn down the mountain sides.

“You fly over the area and you can’t believe it,” said Jolie during her three-day visit for the UN refugee agency that ended on Saturday. “No one sitting at home has any idea what this really looks like. It is unbelievable. For 20 minutes flying we just saw one house after another broken. There is nothing standing.”

The Goodwill Ambassador came to see first-hand the impact of the October 8 earthquake that killed at least 73,000 people and left tens of thousands homeless in one of the poorest areas of a generally impoverished country. From high-altitude villages where assistance is just arriving, to the almost totally destroyed city of Balakot, to the hospital in Islamabad where thousands of injured were treated, she heard from survivors about the horror of the earthquake and their fears for the future.

UNHCR, mandated to protect refugees, is not normally involved in natural disasters. But for the second time in a year – this earthquake and the tsunami that devastated the coasts of south and south-east Asia last December – the UN refugee agency found itself at the centre of an overwhelming humanitarian crisis.

As in Sri Lanka, where UNHCR has long been active, the agency has been in Pakistan for three decades assisting Afghan refugees. Within hours of the earthquake, UNHCR had opened its warehouses and began distributing tents, blankets and plastic sheeting to the victims of the earthquake.

“It is an obligation to be here and to help the people of Pakistan, and to stand by them at this time after having seen them do so much for the Afghan people over the years,” Jolie told reporters at a joint news conference with UNHCR High Commissioner António Guterres on Friday in Islamabad. Guterres was in the middle of a major tour of the region, and had also visited the devastated earthquake zone the previous day.

“I’m sorry it’s something we have to do. I’m sorry we’re in this situation, but I am so glad to be here for them,” said Jolie, whose two previous visits to Pakistan had been to meet Afghan refugees.

The UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador learned first-hand that this earthquake presents extreme challenges requiring sustained assistance – the initial disaster could be followed by a second as the harsh winter begins to grip the Himalayan slopes where people lost their houses.

A visit to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir where thousands died, had to be cut short on Saturday as clouds began to obscure the surrounding peaks and prevent flights. It was likely to bring snow to the area Jolie had visited earlier in the day, a remote community at Jabel Sharoon in the Neelum Valley, located at an altitude of around 2,000 metres.

Jolie and fellow actor Brad Pitt, jointly making the UNHCR-facilitated tour, had flown on board Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) helicopters that were carrying food into the isolated mountain-side strewn with the wreckage of wooden houses. AKF, an international aid and development organization which has been present in this part of Pakistan for many years, has worked closely with UNHCR in carrying aid into the mountains and evacuating thousands of injured.

“There are many people who are in the highest altitudes who for many reasons do not want to move – are afraid of losing their property and are used to that life – and if they don’t leave they will try to rebuild soon,” Jolie said. “I don’t know if that is possible … some of the people are trying to rebuild now, but I do think it is an emergency effort just to survive.”

As she talked with survivors at Jabel Sharoon, a frigid wind was already sweeping off mountains dusted with snow. Those who have had to give up the struggle to stay through the winter are making their way down the slopes to relief camps. Some are moving into spontaneous clusters of tents, a potential health problem, but others are moving to large, well-equipped camps set up by the Pakistan authorities with UNHCR assistance.

UNHCR, which has decades of accumulated expertise caring for refugee influxes around the world, has been tasked by the UN with providing guidance on building and maintaining these temporary camps for survivors.

Jolie visited the Ghari Habibullah camp, which was erected by the Pakistani army, and was relieved to hear from residents that, while still traumatized, they now felt secure as the winter approaches. The camp commander reported a steady, continuing flow of survivors from the high valleys.

She also visited the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad, which was the key medical facility in the weeks following the earthquake, and talked with children – many of them amputees – who require continuing assistance. At one point thousands of patients had overflowed the wards and were being treated in the corridors.

After hearing that the hospital was trying to raise funds to buy 40 specialized beds for patients who are paralyzed from spinal injuries suffered in the earthquake, Brad Pitt immediately offered to provide all of them – a donation worth more than US$100,000.

Jolie emphasized that the needs of survivors, especially with winter starting to close in on the Himalayas, are immense and urgent – international assistance has to continue and pledges made by governments have to be honoured.

“This is not just one disaster that has happened,” she said. “There is another disaster that could happen very soon if there is not enough coordination and money on the ground as soon as possible.”

By Jack Redden
In Islamabad

thank you mercy

UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Jolie urges aid for Afghans in Afghanistan and Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, May 9 (UNHCR) – UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie thanked Pakistan for hosting millions of Afghans over the past quarter century and appealed for international assistance to help both Afghanistan and Pakistan attack poverty through economic development.

Jolie, after three days of visiting Afghans in conditions from refugee camps to brick kilns where entire families labour, told a news conference Saturday that she had been brought to tears by what she had seen. But she was encouraged that in talks with UNHCR staff and the top leaders of Pakistan, she found agreement on what had to be done.

“Everybody feels that forced repatriation is not the aim and not something that should be done,” the American actress said. “Another thing is that the burden on Pakistan and the Pakistani people, which has lasted 25 years, is very large and they have not been given the support that they should have been given.”

While Jolie helped UNHCR’s voluntary repatriation programme, personally seeing off a convoy that pushed the number of Afghans returning this year above the 50,000 mark, she said there was a continuing need both to help those who still felt unable to go home and for more urgent development in Afghanistan.

“It’s up to the international community to help to fund and to help shoulder the burden of the problem in this part of the world – to help the people, help the families, to continue the programmes and encourage that there be more and faster development,” said Jolie, who had last been in Pakistan when Afghans were fleeing war in their country.

Soon after her 2001 visit, the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were ousted and the flow reversed, with more than 2.3 million Afghans returning from Pakistan since 2002.

Jolie started her second visit to Pakistan last Wednesday by watching Afghans departing with UNHCR assistance from Islamabad. The following day, in the town of Attock near the Indus River, she spoke with many of the 500 Afghans who were returning that day. After talking to children who made their living collecting rubbish – a common occupation for Afghans in Pakistan – she scaled the side of a truck to speak with the women and children on the top.

But she also saw the complexity of the problem, wandering later on Thursday through the mud alleys of Katcha Gahri camp on the outskirts of Peshawar. Sitting with a group of children against the wall of a mud house, she heard many say they did not expect to return soon to a country that still lacks basic services.

The UN refugee agency and the government of Pakistan have started discussions on how to manage the Afghans who are likely to remain in the country after the current Tripartite Agreement between UNHCR and the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan ends in March next year. The agreement governs voluntary repatriation.

A census earlier this year – the first ever conducted of Afghans in Pakistan – counted just over three million Afghans who have arrived since the start of the chaos in Afghanistan in 1979. Some could be refugees but many fall in other categories such as migrant or even seasonal labour.

Jolie saw first hand the need for a shift toward development to address poverty. During an emotional visit with Afghan families labouring in the brick kilns on the outskirts of Islamabad, she watched children as young as six or seven years old pounding the mud into moulds. They earn about one U.S. cent for three bricks.

“It was really one of the worst things that I have ever seen – it is very, very difficult as a mother to see children having to work,” she said, admitting to reporters she had cried at the sight. “But I do understand that it’s very hard for these parents who need their children to work because they still don’t have the ability to eat unless the entire family is working.”

UNHCR is discussing a new international emphasis on rehabilitating degraded areas of Pakistan from where Afghans have gone home and also assisting both Afghans and Pakistanis in areas where they productively co-exist. This would be simultaneous with efforts to increase Afghanistan’s ability to absorb the millions of its citizens still outside its borders in Pakistan and Iran.

Jolie said the need for increased development aid to Afghanistan – a goal of UNHCR – had surfaced repeatedly in official talks during an intense three-day schedule that included meetings with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

Jolie said repatriation, the preferred goal of both UNHCR and Pakistan, would be a slow process. Despite that, UNHCR’s Goodwill Ambassador said she had found a deep desire among Afghans to go home even with the economic hardships they could face.

“I met a woman who was about to get on the truck with a small baby and didn’t have a husband. She was crying but she wanted to go home to Afghanistan,” Jolie said. “She said: ‘I have no water, I have no school, I have no house, I have nothing. I am scared but I am going and because I have God, I hope I will be okay.”

Jolie said the woman was probably arriving at her destination in Afghanistan on Saturday as she was ending her visit to Pakistan: “I too hope she will be okay because I don’t know how she is going to survive – how she will earn a living, find food and find health care.”

By Jack Redden
UNHCR Pakistan

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/427f2e0d4.html

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Jolie jokes with Afghan children in the refugee camp of Katcha Ghari on the edge of Peshawar. © UNHCR/J.Redden

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UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie (centre) celebrating Christmas Eve with UNHCR staff in Beirut. © UNHCR Beirut

Who, in right mind, will believe that junk magazine?

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UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie with internally displaced children in Margasa village, West Darfur. Before clothes and food, they asked for security, said Jolie. © UNHCR/R.Ek

Urgent funds needed for Darfur refugees, stresses Jolie

IRIBA, Chad, June 7 (UNHCR) – UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie has stressed the urgency of funding more assistance for Sudanese refugees in Chad after seeing first-hand the dire situation in the border area.

Over the weekend, the Goodwill Ambassador visited eastern Chad’s border sites and camps for refugees who had fled fighting in western Sudan’s Darfur region. She heard stories of militia attacks and saw aid agencies rushing to provide the refugees with emergency assistance.

“UNHCR and its partners in eastern Chad are working closely together to assist the Sudanese refugees in Chad as best as they can, an uphill battle that they seem to be winning,” said Jolie after a two-day mission that ended on Saturday. “But they are in a race against time before the rainy season comes.”

“When the rains start to fall, the weak temporary structures in the makeshift shelters will be in danger of collapsing. There will be illnesses, especially among children, due to the sanitary situation breaking down,” Jolie warned, adding that the rains will also render the roads impassable, making emergency transport, medical and food shipment close to impossible.

Travelling to the Chadian border town of Tine on Friday, Jolie spoke to some Sudanese refugees in makeshift shelters. “I fled the village with my children and walked several days before arriving here in Tine,” said one woman, recalling how the Janjaweed militia stormed into her village four months ago, shooting at people, looting and burning all the houses.

In Tine, a major entry point for Darfur’s refugees in recent months, the Goodwill Ambassador helped refugees, mainly women and children, to board UNHCR trucks. She distributed high-protein biscuits for their four-hour journey to the camp of Mille, where some 200 refugees were to be relocated that day. UNHCR organises convoys every other day from Tine to Mille camp.

Mille is one of eight inland camps where more than 81,000 refugees have been relocated to protect them against cross-border incursions by the Sudanese militia, and where they can receive regular assistance.

At Iridimi camp, two hours away from the border, Jolie joined a nutrition team from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention as they weighed and measured refugee children to check for possible malnourishment.

She then travelled to the nearby village of Iridimi, where a team from the Norwegian Church Aid briefed her on their water project and showed her the latest borehole they had dug to provide water for the refugees. The water is stored in bladders and trucked from the village to the camp. Currently, refugees in Iridimi get only 6 to 7 litres of water a day, far from the 15 litres they need per day. The new borehole should allow them to get closer to this minimum requirement.

The shortage of water in this arid region has posed a huge challenge in UNHCR and its partners’ search for camp sites to relocate the refugees.

On Saturday, Jolie visited a nutrition centre run by Médecins Sans Frontières-Belgique in the hospital at Iriba. Over 120 malnourished refugee children are being treated there. The Goodwill Ambassador also took part in a food distribution for 700 refugees who will be transported to Mille camp in the coming days.

Her mission ended with a visit to Touloum camp, 17 km from Iriba, which now hosts 17,000 refugees. Concluding the trip, she emphasised the urgent need for UNHCR and its partners to get additional funding in order to continue assisting the Sudanese refugees in Chad.

In all, there are an estimated 158,000 Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad.

Story date: 7 June 2004
UNHCR News Stories

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