World must do more - Jolie
2005-05-07 11:17
Islamabad - Hollywood star and UN goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie on Saturday made an emotional appeal to the international community to help millions of Afghan refugees living in Pakistan.
Jolie spoke to reporters after four days in Pakistan, where she toured sprawling camps in the country's northwest near the Afghan border, and met on Friday with military leader President General Pervez Musharraf.
"I thank the Pakistani government for everything it has done for Afghan refugees," she told a news conference in Islamabad. "I ask the international community to do more to fund and to help shoulder the burden of this part of the world."
She also stressed the need to develop rural Afghanistan to help refugees - some of whom have been in Pakistan for over 25 years - to build a new life in their war-battered homeland.
"Well, I spent a lot of time crying yesterday. I don't have a lot of answers, you know. I wish I did. I wish I could solve it for them," Jolie said.
"I met a woman who was about to get on a truck with a small baby. She did not have her husband. She was crying and wanted to go home. She was ready to go to Afghanistan.
"I hope she is ok too because I do not know how she is going to survive, and how she will be able to make a living, to find food, to find health care. So it is very, very difficult but many people are moving back."
Since the fall of the hardline Taliban regime in late 2001, an estimated 2.3m Afghans have gone back to their country under a UN-supported repatriation program - often returning to a life of dire poverty.
More than 3m others remain in camps and cities in Pakistan.
The flight of Afghan refugees to Pakistan - and Iran - began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and continued in the 1990s during a bloody civil war, the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban and years of drought.
Officials said Musharraf told Jolie that Pakistan - which is keen for the remaining Afghans to go home - would continue to provide facilities for the refugees and facilitate their return under the UN repatriation program.
The actress - who won a supporting-actress Oscar for 1999's "Girl, Interrupted" - became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2001, and has visited refugee camps throughout the world.
- AP