Angelina Jolie Watch

Angelina completed her first post-twins UNHCR trip yesterday.  She visited Afghan citizens who’d returned home from neighboring countries like Pakistan.

During her trip, Ms. Jolie visited recent returnees in the eastern province of Nangarhar, where almost 20 per cent of all Afghans who return to the homeland have settled since 2002.

Refugees told Angelina that they are not able to return to their homes of origins because of poor security and lack of land. People who have are still in their home country but are not able to return to their original city and state are classified as internal refugees.

Angelina was impressed with the “the courage, resilience and quiet dignity of returnee families rebuilding their lives against the kind of adversity few of us can imagine shows the human spirit at its best.” She encouraged more international age fore resettling Afghanis.

As always,  kudos to Angelina.

I forgot to mention this but the forum was co-sponsored by Angie’s group Education Partnership for Children of Conflict. She founded the group with Gene Speerling last year as part of the 2007 Clinton Initiative. In this video from Tuesday’s conference, she’s talks about how transformative education can be to a child of conflict.

To read additional facts about children of conflict click below. I am eternally grateful to Angelina for her continued education on this subject. (more…)

The UNHCR is looking at the plight of the Internally Displaced Person and how to best deal with this unique population.

Like refugees, they are hapless civilians often caught up in an endless round of civil conflict or persecution. There are an estimated 25 million of them around the world and they are sometimes known by the clumsy bureaucratic acronym of “IDP” – an Internally Displaced Person. What is the difference? When a fleeing civilian crosses an international frontier, he or she becomes a refugee and as such receives international protection and help. If a person in similar circumstances is displaced within his or her home country and becomes internally displaced person then assistance and protection is much more problematic. UNHCR currently helps over 12.8 million of those internally displaced, and a lively international debate is underway on how to more effectively help this group.

Below is a list of Internally Displaced populations that currently receive aid from the UNHCR. Most IDPs are not under the jurisdiction of the UNHCR even though they have been driven from their homeland by war, conflict or other life threatening conditions. Essentially they are just like refugees but have not crossed into another internationally recognized country

Colombia 3,000,000
Iraq 1,834,400
Uganda 1,586,200
Sudan 1,325,200
Dem. Rep. of the Congo 1,075,300
Côte d’Ivoire 709,200
Azerbaijan 686,600
Sri Lanka 469,200
Somalia 400,000
Georgia 246,000
Serbia 227,600
Lebanon 200,000
Russian Federation 158,900
Timor-Leste 155,200
Central African Rep. 147,000
Bosnia and Herzegovina 135,500
Afghanistan 129,300
Chad 112,700
Nepal 100,000
Myanmar 58,500
Montenegro 16,200
Burundi 13,900
Croatia 4,000
Congo 3,500

When populations cross international country lines in an effort to save their lives they are generally given food, water and shelter. International law requires basic humane treatment. When people flee within their own state, the same safeguards don’t apply. The UNHCR is working hard to figure out how to best serve this population. For more information go HERE.

internally displaced persons, refugees, unhcr, angelina jolie

We know that Angelina and the UNHCR work extremely hard for refugees but I didn’t know a lot about the organization’s history or just basic information for that matter. Because I’m on a research kick, I did a little bit of research about this humanitarian organization.

Check out these facts about the UNHCR:

• The UNHCR was established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly.
• The UNHCR stands for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
• The group’s mission is to protect the well being and rights of refugees.
• The UNHCR offers assistance to refugees regardless of race, nationality or religious preference.
• The United Nations defines a refugee as “A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it..”
• The original mandate was a three year mission to help European refugees of World War 2.
• The organization relies completely on voluntary contributions from countries, corporations and individuals.
• The UNHCR seeks to repatriate refugees to their homeland if conditions warrant. If conditions are not subtable for repatriation, the UNHCR seeks to integrate or resettle refugees in other countries.
• António Guterres is the current High Commissioner. His term expires in 2009.
• Angelina is one of seven current Goodwill Ambassadors.
• Goowill Ambassadors use their celebrity to bring attention to the plight refugees.

“Refugees have done more for my heart and my spirit than I can ever express in words.” -Angelina Jolie

To donate to UNHCR go HERE. Every little bit helps.

Photo Notes: Angelina Jolie with the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs, Anand Sharma in New Delhi, November 2006.

angelina jolie, refugees, unhcr, united nations

Blog Action Day is an annual day set aside for blogger’s to talk about one issue. This year we focus on the environment.

Though Brad appears to be the environmentalist in the family I think it’s a topic Angelina would approve of because of environmental refugees.

Experts predicts that their will be 50 million environmental refugees by 2010. Environmental refugees are peoples displaced by “rising sea levels, desertification, dried up aquifers, weather-induced flooding and other serious environmental changes.”

To put it simply, changes in the environment cause millions people to flee their homes each year. Environmental refugees are most prevalent in Sub-Sahara Africa but also pose a major problem throughout Asia and India. The United States and Europe are seeing increased pressure to provide havens for environmental refugees from North and South America.

Here are some interesting facts about these unique refugees:

• Environmental refugees are not recognized by any international convention.
• The United Nations University says that the international community should define, recognize and extend support to this new category of refugee.
• The UN says that by 2050 their will be 150 million environmental refugees due to erosion, coastal flooding and agricultural disruption.
• Hurricane Katrina forced a million people from New Orleans and cities along the Mississippi and Louisiana coast to move inland. Record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico’s helped make Hurricane Katrina one of the most destructive storms in the history of the United States.

You don’t have to change your entire life to make an environmental difference. Small things make a huge difference. For example:

Make sure you have a large to extra large load of laundry before you wash. When buying your next car at least consider a hybrid or one that runs on alternative fuel. Reuse paper-print on the back and front. Turn off your TV for an hour. Lots of things are common sense. Do what you can to make a change.

To learn more about environmental refugees you can refer to the following sources:

Environmental Refugees at About.com

Environmentalrefugee.com

Blog Action Day, environment, angelina jolie, environmental refugees, refugees, un univerity

I’ve been meaning to post this but those Jolie-Pitts can make one’s life so very busy. It’s really hard to keep pace with them.
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The prestigious Council on Foreign Relations has admitted our very own champion of human rights, Angelina Jolie, to its exclusive Manhattan-based foreign-policy group ranks.

Friday, the council’s membership accepted Jolie’s nomination - and Jolie now joins other club members Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan to name a few. The Post reports the group requires “no academic credentials but looks for members who take part in world affairs.” “Bring her on,” said Dr. Gordon Adams, an international-affairs professor. “The idea of having Henry Kissinger and Angelina Jolie in the same organization is dazzling.”

The Post reports member Carol Adelman, former head of U.S. foreign-aid programs, saying, “It’s not like Paris Hilton is being nominated.”

This is the final installment of the video’s originally aired on MTV showing Angelina Jolie in Sauri, Kenya with Jeffrey Sachs. These videos show what changes Angelina’s work has helped to make as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Last week I posted the first installment of the videos I found of Angelina Jolie’s coverage of her visits with refugees in Suari. These clips are from her travels with Jeffrey Sachs Millenium Project, originally airing on MTV. This is the second clip.

This is the first time I’ve come across this video. It contains footage from her trips as UN High Commissioner for Refugees. And if you are interested in learning more of Angelina’s visits with refugees, I really recommend picking up her book, Notes from My Travels: Visits with Refugees in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Ecuador
by Angelina Jolie, Caspian Tredwell-Owen

Crave Online: You’re such a strong willed woman. How could you relate to this token wife who just sits there drinking?

Angelina Jolie: So much of that film for me was a study in that kind of restraint because I live in a time, we all do, where as a woman, I can say, “I’m leaving, I’m getting a divorce, you tell me what’s going on” or even speaking in a manner that’s muchharsher without it being the ugliest thing in the world. And she had to maintain a certain kind of composure, quiet decency, just settle into that life. It was that time and the CIA, the idea of getting out was just impossible as a woman. So it was very hard because everything instinctually in me was [the opposite].

Crave: We don’t understand why the guy doesn’t want to be home with you. How hard was it for you to play rejected and unloved?

Angelina: Well, I do have two divorces behind me. [laughs] But I’m still good friends with them, so it’s still okay. But I think it’s actually easier to play that kind of stuff when you do have a balanced home. Because I think if I did have alcoholism in my personal life or my mother or somebody close to me, if I did have that experience, it might have been much more uncomfortable to get in there. And that kind of relationship with a man, I’ve never had that in my life, because I’ve always married artists, so they’re always a very talkative and expressive bunch. So, no, it was just bizarre, but it was part of the character which was interesting, because she did feel lost and she did feel trapped and confused, and so I did as well.

Crave: Do you think some kind of deception is a necessary evil in any relationship?

Angelina: No, I think quite the opposite is the only thing that works. I don’t want to spend my life having to pretend to be somebody else. And I don’t want the person next to me to have to pretend, ever. We have a long life ahead of us. So you want to just be able to be who you are in every moment, and that’s the only way you’ll ever be truly happy anyway.

Crave: How did you like seeing yourself aged in the film, and how will you age gracefully?

Angelina: My mom is aging gracefully, so if I’m anything like my mother. She’s lovely. I love age on a face. I know in this business, there’s not a lot of leverage for the way people have an opinion about how people should look, but I personally love it, and I love to age in movies. I love to see my face old in different ways and I actually feel there’s something very earned so many different things and be rooted in so many different ways that it seems there’s kind of a comfort to it. But Clover was a little different because I hopefully will not break apart as she did, because she had these big yellow contacts and yellow teeth. You may not have noticed it, but I had the alcohol age if you look closely with her. There are a lot of broken capillaries and a lot of yellow. That wasn’t looking in the mirror and saying, “I’ll look like this.” This is what I will look like if I start drinking.

Crave: Could you do any research on CIA wives?

Angelina: I didn’t because most of the people they could all talk to were really the men in the CIA. And the women like Clover were kind of absent or had been quieted or moved to Arizona. One of them did actually. That’s actually a true story, somebody’s living there now. She’s loosely based on a few people, but it was almost impossible to talk to the women, and I think that the reality is that the women knew so little. There would be very little to talk about. My choice was almost to really talk to nobody, really understand nothing and be trapped in this world where sometimes De Niro’s character would come in and I hadn’t focused on exactly who he was in the script and exactly what he did, and I didn’t do my research, so he walked in and I wasn’t really sure who he was. And that was kind of how I just stayed in the dark.

Crave: Have you ever encountered the CIA in your humanitarian activities?

Angelina: That’s such a huge question. I think that I’ve never been clearly aware of something specific, but I think certainly I have witnessed our foreign policy and witnessed the change in the perception of America’s foreign policy in the last few years. Every trip I take the feel has been different because of the changes we have made. And I’m sure the CIA has had a hand in that.

Crave: What changes?

Angelina: To be completely honest, I think about 5 years ago when I started traveling and I’d say I was American, everyone was very, very excited and thought it was the greatest thing in the world and the greatest place in the world. And now there’s a certain… you feel cautious, you feel that people are a bit not so joyful about that. They’re questioning my country you know, where people say things like, “It’s extraordinary you’re here because you’re American,” and that’s not true to the American people. The American people are very caring, generous people. That’s been proven with the work every individual householdhas done abroad and the charity they do and who we are as a people. But it’s not what our government has represented in the last few years, I think. So it’s been difficult to go to places abroad and just see… I think we all know exactly what I’m saying.

Crave: Has your social activism made you want to do more serious movies?

Angelina: No, I think it’s important to just have fun and not take everything so seriously, because I think there’s a big room forentertainment in this world. That’s most of the movies I go to with my kids. That’s part of what we do. I’m not a politician. I amjust an actor, and just supposed to entertain and tell stories, so I remember that. But certainly when a film project comes along like this one, or like Mighty Heart, the Mariane Pearl Story, they are ones that take a priority in my life and are ones that I enjoy more in a different way and are a very different experience. But I think the thing right now that makes the big choice is kind of how long is it shooting. I don’t think I’ve shot more than seven weeks on a movie in two years. I need to make sure I have time with my kids.

Crave: Would you work with Brad again?

Angelina: Who’s going watch the children?

Crave: What new projects would you like to initiate?

Angelina: There are many different things. I will continue to work with refugees, and I will never shift focus from them because I think it’s important, and it is where my heart lies. Cambodia, we just went back there and it’s changed so much over the years. It is now Millenium Village that Brad and I are supporting. It’s also a 148,000 acres of protected forest, and it’salso many, many villagers, and it’s huge. A huge, huge project, which is not what I intended. But it’s wonderful, and I’m learning a lot. But we’re involved in many things, Brad’s work in New Orleans. We’re just trying to make sure we always stay focused and because our temptation is to just, we hear something that’s going on, and we want to get involved. We’re working together on AIDS orphans and passing some legislation for them on their behalf, because there’s no one actually fighting for them, so we’ve put together a group of people that will do exactly that. For Zahara as well we want to do something in Ethiopia supporting an orphanage there but I think we will figure out something specific, just so Maddox will take over his project, we want her to take over hers. So we have to figure out what that is.

Crave: Does it ever bleed over into your film work?

Angelina: Sometimes it does. I am interested in the art coming out of different countries. I’m starting to learn about different directors. Even Cambodia’s having a big arts splurge now, and they’re having new posters for their movies up, which they never had a few years ago. I’m fascinated by supporting local artists which I’m sure will be little projects that will not make it here any time soon, but we’ll start to get to know their stories. We talked to people in India, Pakistan, their favorite plays, their favorite pieces of literature.

Crave: The media’s always after you. How does it affect your life?

Angelina: I’ve made a point to not let it change the way I live my life, other than I carefully plan my holidays or where we go, or where we stay or things like that, to try and ensure some kind of quality of life that’s private and nice for the kids. But we simply don’t let it effect us. I think the only time it is hard when the kids want to go somewhere and I’ve had so many people offer to take my children to Disneyland or places that I can’t take them, and they don’t understand how upsetting that is. To take my kids trick or treating, things they assume I can’t do. So we plan to find ways to do all of those things. And there are worse problems.

Crave: Can’t you go incognito at Halloween?

Angelina: I have. I was just going to do a mix of odd masks and things. This year we were in India, so we had this really odd celebration in the hotel. We just had candy and costumes sent up from the States, so he had a really big Afro and I had dreadlocks. We were trying to explain to them what it was, but really we just had fun with dress up.

Crave: You do so much, how do you manage everything?

Angelina: I plan a lot, obsessively. I’m very, very lucky. I love the different elements in my life and I love working abroad, and I love being with my kids and I love being with Brad, so this is the life I chose to have and I’d like to add many more children and many more obstacles and many more things.

Source

The Sports Gal is the wife of ESPN writer Bill Simmons. Somewhere along the lines, someone decided that her opinion counted and she now gets a little blurb on the side of her greater-known hubby entitled “The Sports Gal Speaks” This is what she had to say:

I used to really like Angelina Jolie. Ever since she starred in “Gia,” I admired her flawless natural beauty, as well as the many character flaws that made her more likable and less threatening overall. Maybe she was a recovering drug addict, a cutter, a brother kisser, and a blood vial-wearing skank who looked like she showered once a week, but she didn’t care what others thought and was totally comfortable going out in public without tons of makeup on. So that made her likable, at least to me. Even when she married Billy Bob Thornton, who’s absolutely disgusting, I didn’t hold it against her.

Then everything changed: She adopted Maddox, became a goodwill ambassador, started making normal movies and slowly made everyone forget that she was crazy. Next, she seduced and stole the husband of one of the most likable female celebs, adopted another baby with her stolen man, then had his biological child months before his divorce was even done. Now she travels all over the world in private jets wasting fuel and pretending to do nice things when we all know she’s really a husband-stealing witch. But what really turned me into a full fledged Angelina hater was this month’s Vogue article about her, with Angelina smugly pushing for peace talks between her and Jennifer Aniston, even having the gall to say, “That would be her decision, and I would welcome it.” If I were Jennifer Aniston, I would welcome it, too. Then I would meet Angelina for lunch and repeatedly smash a chair over her head.

All I have to say? Grrr. Heaven forbid someone grows up a little and does a little good in this world.

Source

Angelina with Tham Hin Refugees

As part of her work as a UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Angelina spent Christmas day in Costa Rica with (mostly) Colombian refugee children and their families.

After arriving in San Jose, Jolie made the following statement, “The conflict in Colombia is the greatest humanitarian tragedy in the Western Hemisphere, but it receives very little international attention, my Christmas message to Colombian refugees and to the millions of displaced people in Colombia is that the world has not totally forgotten them.”

Approximately three million Colombians have been forced from out of their homes and towns during more than two decades of conflict, however a large portion remain in Colombia. In addition, approximately 500,000 have fled to other countries in the surrounding areas. According to the UNHCR, the misplaced Colombian refugees make up the largest single population of concern anywhere in the world.

UNHCR said this is Angelina’s second trip to the region.