Angelina writes editiorial for Refugees magazine

After visiting refugees in over 20 countries, UNHCR's Goodwill Ambassador presents her views in a guest editorial.

Solving the Global Refugee Crisis

Angelina Jolie argues we should avoid repeating past mistakes by adopting more thoughtful policies, and investing more resources in refugees’ home regions.

Only half a century ago – a blink of the eye in human history – there were at least 40 million refugees and

displaced people in Europe: the product of Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, and, later of the colonels’ regime in Greece, and the Soviet subjugation of Central Europe, including

Hungary.

These countries are all now member states of the European Union, and it is almost inconceivable they would produce refugees today. So inconceivable, that their citizens have the luxury of forgetting what it was like to be governed by a tyrannical regime, or to be tortured for your political

beliefs.

In America, Martin Luther King had to be assassinated before racial equality became anything like a reality.

Earlier this year, Refugees magazine (No. 142) carried a photograph that seems to me in many ways to sum up this amnesia about a thousand years of warfare, tyranny and repression. It shows a couple, in bikini and swimming trunks, sitting contentedly on their towels under an umbrella on the beach. There is only one other

person visible on the beach. He is black and he is dead – an immigrant or a refugee, sprawled across the sand at the high-water mark. We’ll never know who he was or why he ended up there, and the couple on the

beach apparently couldn’t care less.

It is a pretty sad picture. Sad for the anonymous man whose corpse washed up, like so many others, on a Mediterranean coast a few years ago. Sad for the couple, sitting under the umbrella with their picnic box and suntan oil, that they can’t see the stark reality lying a few yards further up the beach. Someone’s son, someone’s brother, or someone’s loved one. In fact you, or me, if we had been born at another time, or in another place.

To read the rest of the article (3 more pages), go to the UNHCR website and download the magazine in PDF format here....

http://www.unhcr.org/doclist/publ/3e50becf4.html

Its #1 or #2, which ever size you can download.

The picture she is talking about is this one....

Thanks to katja for the pic.

Edited October 11, 200619 yr by Trinity34