Jolie appeals for urgent delivery of Pakistan aid
Actress and refugee advocate Angelina Jolie today appealed for the swift delivery of promised aid to Pakistan, saying a new disaster threatens earthquake survivors when harsh winter conditions settle on devastated mountain areas.
Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, spoke a day after touring quake-devastated areas with actor Brad Pitt.
“The pledges that were made need to materialise soon, because as I’m understanding, there are so many wonderful pledges of money that could come in the next few years – but this winter is in the next few weeks,” Jolie told a news conference in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.
“There’s another disaster that could happen very soon,” she said.
Yesterday, Jolie and Pitt made an unannounced visit to a town that was largely destroyed, a tent camp for homeless survivors in a high mountain valley that was hard hit by the October 8 quake, which killed an estimated 86,000 people and destroyed the homes of more than 3 million in Pakistan.
Pitt has been sporadically spotted and photographed with Jolie for months since his break-up with actress Jennifer Anniston. He did not attend the news conference.
“These people there have not been given a lot of aid,” Jolie said of the valley, where UNHCR officials said she travelled aboard a helicopter that brought food, blankets and plastic sheets to improve shelters. “They’re very far out and they’re very concerned about the winter coming.”
Like UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, who made a separate tour of the quake area, Jolie expressed shock at the disaster’s scale.
“You watch TV and you see the pictures, but nobody sitting at home has any idea what this really looks like,” she said. “It’s just unbelievable. You fly in a helicopter and you see ... house after house – just rubble, nothing standing.”
Guterres has urged local officials and the international aid community to urgently prepare for the expected arrival of tens of thousands of people fleeing their high-altitude villages as winter sets in.
But other residents are expected to remain where they are. Aid agencies, along with the Pakistani army and Nato, are struggling to ensure those people get the help they need to survive the next few months.
Faisal Saleh Hayyat, the government minister for Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir, inaugurated a settlement of 30 temporary homes built by Islamic charity Muslim Hands on the outskirts of provincial capital Muzaffarabad. The charity’s chief, Malik Naeem, said it would build 500 shelters.
While much of the pledged aid is meant for reconstruction, Jolie said the focus now is on survival and that many victims are still dealing with the horror of the quake.
“We’re ready to go in and talk about, ’What are they going to do now ... what’s going to happen,’ and you see them and you realize after talking to them that they are still, understandably, very traumatised,” she said.
Speaking at the same news conference, Guterres said there was a “strict obligation” to help Pakistan in its “moments of suffering” as payback for hosting millions of refugees from a quarter-century of war and chaos in neighbouring Afghanistan.
He urged the international community to help Afghanistan with development projects that would allow for hundreds of thousands of returning refugees to integrate into the still-troubled, impoverished country.
“That is absolutely essential for voluntary repatriation to be sustainable,” Guterres said.
