Angelina Jolie’s day job is acting, but since 2001 she has been playing another real-life role: advocate for the world’s refugees. This week she took her show to Thailand.
As a goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commissioner of Refugees, she is trying to leverage her celebrity status to put the spotlight on refugees from military-ruled Myanmar, including boat-people from that country’s Rohingya minority.
The Rohingya, denied citizenship in their native land, recently drew the world’s attention when boatloads who tried to land in Thailand after a treacherous sea journey were towed back to sea and cast adrift by the Thai Navy. Indian officials, who rescued some, believe hundreds perished.
But the Rohingya, from western Myanmar, represent just a part of Myanmar’s refugee exodus.
For decades, hundreds of thousands of others — most from other ethnic minorities — have fled by land across the country’s eastern border to Thailand, which has accorded most sanctuary.
Most are civilians caught up in fighting between Myanmar government troops and ethnic insurgents. Faced with the risks of war, many flee to Thai refugee camps, where they are cooped up for years on end with little chance of resettlement in third countries and scant incentive to return to their homes.
On Wednesday, Jolie slapped a bright blue UN baseball cap on her head and toured the bamboo huts making up the Ban Mai Nai Soi camp, home to 18,111 mainly ethnic Karenni refugees, just two miles (three kilometers) from the Myanmar border, near the northern Thai town of Mae Hong Son. There are between 116,000 and 135,000 refugees in total at camps along the border.
Jolie, 33, sat down in a two-room house on stilts and talked with a female refugee, according to an account of the visit given Thursday in a press release by the UN refugee agency. She then met orphans at a boarding school and heard from teenage girls worried that they might be sent back to Myanmar
Jolie asked one 26-year-old woman, Pan Sein, whether she was afraid when she made her perilous journey last year from her home village in Myanmar’s Kayah State.
“Yes, I was scared,” Pan Sein replied. “It was dangerous to flee, but even more dangerous to stay in my village.”
Jolie is no stranger to the area. This was Jolie’s third visit to Thailand to meet with refugees and her mission has taken her to more than 20 countries to comfort the unwanted.
“I was saddened to meet a 21-year-old woman who was born in a refugee camp, who has never even been out of the camp and is now raising her own child in a camp,” Jolie said. “With no foreseeable chance that these refugees will soon be able to return to Burma (Myanmar), we must find some way to help them work and become self-reliant.”
Jolie also raised her voice on behalf of the even more neglected Rohingya, whose status is much more precarious than the refugees at these border camps. The UNHCR was only recently able to gain access to 78 being detained in southern Thailand who arrived after a dangerous journey through the Andaman Sea.
Thailand is facing an international outcry over its treatment of the minority Muslim Rohingya group, after CNN published a photo showing armed forces towing refugee boats away from the shore on Jan. 26. Five of six boats towed in late December sank, killing several hundred people, CNN reported.
Witnessing the government’s hospitality to the refugees sheltering in camps “makes me hope that Thailand will be just as generous to the Rohingya refugees who are now arriving on their shores,” the Oscar-winning actress said, according to a statement on the UN’s Web site.
Thousands of Rohingyas flee Myanmar each year because of land confiscation, arbitrary taxation, forced eviction and denial of citizenship, according to Amnesty International. Some members of the estimated population of 3 million also attempt to settle in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said earlier this week that his government won’t build a camp for the Rohingyas and will continue to expel them.
“They are not refugees,” Abhisit said in Bangkok on Jan. 4. “Our policy is to push them out of the country because they are illegal migrants.”
The government has said it is investigating the CNN report and the navy has denied allegations the boats were sent out without engines and adequate food and water.
Thailand has asked the UN to join a regional forum to help address the migrant issue.
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