Angelina Jolie: Be ‘tolerant’ of refugee influx

Actress Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie said the world is living through an era of mass displacement and people need to be tolerant of refugees coming into their countries from diverse cultures and who may not be able to return home.

The actress made the comments on “World Refugee Day” June 20 as she visited a large Syrian refugee camp in southeastern Turkey.

Jolie read a prepared statement while standing alongside United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees Antonio Guterres, who wants the U.S. to accept 65,000 or half of the 130,000 Syrian refugees the U.N. has designated for permanent resettlement in mostly Western countries.

That’s a tiny fraction of the overall 3.8 million people who have been displaced from their homes by the Syrian civil war, now in its fifth year, according to U.N. figures.

Jolie told journalists at the camp near Mandin, Turkey, that “never before have so many people been dispossessed or stripped of their human rights,” the Associated Press reported.

She did not mention the destabilizing role of Sunni Muslim terrorists such as ISIS, al-Nusra Front or the Free Syrian Army in attacking Christians, Shiites, Yazidis and other religious minorities in the Syria. Nor did she mention President Obama’s foreign policy decision to encourage “Arab Spring” uprisings in Syria and Libya or his decision to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq, all of which critics say helped generate massive numbers of refugees in the Middle East.

Angelina Jolie on a guided trek through Ecuador.

Jolie’s visit is the latest in a series of visits to Turkey as part of her work as the UNHCR’s special envoy, according to AP. Her visit was meant to raise awareness of the plight of refugees, the number of which has swelled to a record 60 million worldwide, according to the U.N.

As numbers increase, many countries are scrambling to find ways to close their borders to people who arrive by boat and by land.

Hungary, for example, recently announced plans to build a 13-foot high fence on the border with Serbia to stop the flow of migrants from Asia and Africa, AP reported. Italy is struggling to keep up with the roughly 6,000 boat people who arrive on its shores weekly from northern Africa, many of whom come from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Greek Island of Lesbos has also been overrun with thousands of migrants.

Anti-immigration parties are enjoying a surge in popularity in Germany, Norway, Denmark, Finland, France and Italy.

Jolie was careful not to mention any specific country.

“People are running out of places to run to,” she said, as reported by AP. It is critical, she said, for “the need to be open and tolerant to people … who may not be able to return home.”

Jolie is not the first celebrity to get involved in the refugee cause. Actor Ben Affleck has advocated for those displaced by tribal warfare in the Democratic Republic of Congo and George Clooney has worked on behalf of refugees created by the crisis in Darfur, Sudan.

The U.S. accepts more refugees than the rest of the world’s countries combined, at about 70,000 per year, according to the U.S. Statement Department. The U.S. is currently importing large numbers of refugees from Iraq, Bhutan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria. At least 1,000 refugees will have come from each of these countries in fiscal year 2015, which ends Sept. 30. In the cases of Iraq, Burma and Somalia, the U.S. will take in more than 7,000 this year from each.

Angelina Jolie on an earlier trip to Afghanistan to visit that country’s refugees.

Security concerns slow the Syrian resettlement

Syria was supposed to become the next big refugee program tackled by the Obama administration. The UNHCR and the refugee lobbyist group Refugee Council USA, or RCUSA, which represents the nine major resettlement agencies working under contract with the U.S. State Department, were all calling for a big boost in the number of Syrian refugees allowed into the U.S. A group of 14 U.S. senators, all Democrats, wrote a letter to Obama last month urging him to “dramatically increase” the number of refugees coming into the U.S. from Syria.

But security concerns from Republicans in Congress have slowed the process of admitting Syrians to a trickle, although there are signs that trickle has started to speed up in recent weeks with dozens of Syrians arriving in cities and towns across the U.S. More than

Only 922 Syrians have been allowed into the U.S. since the civil war started in December 2011, but, of those, 664 have arrived since January 2015.

Of the 922 Syrian arrivals, 93 percent have been Muslim with 87 percent affiliating as Sunni Muslim. Only 4.9 percent have been Christian and 1.3 percent Yazidi, according to State Department data.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has been critical of the Obama administration’s plans to ramp up the intake of Syrian refugees, citing security risks. McCaul has scheduled a second congressional hearing June 24 before his committee on the subject of national security and the Syrian refugee program. He’s written two letter to Obama communicating concerns raised by FBI counter-terrorism experts that the U.S. is not able to adequately screen the Syrian refugees because the U.S. has no boots on the ground in Syria and the country is a “failed state” with no reliable intelligence or police records.

The U.N. selects most of the refugees sent to the U.S. and other industrialized countries. The U.S. is responsible for screening them for possible ties to terrorist organizations or criminal activity.

Germany has agreed to take in 30,000 Syrians, while Canada has said it would accept about 11,000, according to the United Nations.

The United States has not given a specific number it will take, though State Department officials have given a range of 1,000 to 2,000 by October, and “many more in the coming years,” the New York Times reported.

Turkey hosts the world’s largest refugee community — about 1.6 million, according the latest U.N. figures. As civil war rages across the border in Syria, the flow shows no sign of letting up and Turkey has started closing off portions of its border.

“We don’t know how many more will be coming,” Fuat Oktay, chief of Turkey’s disaster and emergency agency, told AP. “There’s a huge risk that the number might increase.”

Jolie donates $100,000 to U.N. to help Syrians

Jolie, a UNHCR special envoy, wrote a check for $100,000 to the U.N. refugee agency for its ongoing work with Syrian refugees.

“UNHCR believes even one person forced to flee is too many. And it’s true. Every individual refugee matters,” she wrote in a statement. “Each has their own story. Each has suffered and survived more than I could ever bear. And yet, they rise up to live another day.

“We risk forgetting the individual when we speak in numbers, but the numbers tell an important story. In the past year, 4.3 million people have become displaced. There are still 2.7 million refugees from Afghanistan. Twelve million people are stateless. And for the fifth consecutive year the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide exceeded 42 million.”

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