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Sunday, 21 June 2015

'People are running out of places to run to': Angelina Jolie visits Turkish refugee camps filled with Syrians and Iraqis displaced by war


Jolie receives flowers as she is welcomed by a girl on arrival at the mayor's office in the city of Mardin, Turkey
After visiting a camp for Syrian refugees in southeastern Turkey on Saturday, actress Angelina Jolie said the world is living through an era of mass displacement.
Jolie, who serves as a United Nations special envoy for refugees, was speaking at a news conference in southeastern Turkey, home to Syrians and Iraqis displaced by war, on World Refugee Day.
'Never before have so many people been dispossessed or stripped of their human rights,' Jolie said.
The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said in a report last week that there were now more refugees than at any other time in history, with 59.5million people displaced from their homes worldwide.

'There is an explosion of human suffering and displacement on a level that has never been seen before,' Jolie said, warning that Syrians and Iraqis were running out of safe havens as neighboring states reached the limit of their capacity.
'It is hard to point to a single instance where, as an international community, we are decisively addressing the root causes of refugee flows,' she said.
Jolie's visit is the latest in a series of visits to Turkey as part of her work as the UNHCR's special envoy to bring attention to the plight of refugees.
As numbers increase, many countries are scrambling to find ways to close their doors to the new arrivals. 
Hungary recently announced plans to build a 13ft-high fence on the border with Serbia to stop the flow of migrants from Asia and Africa, and anti-immigrant sentiment has flared elsewhere in Europe.
Jolie spoke of the problem in general terms.
'People are running out of places to run to,' she said, emphasizing 'the need to be open and tolerant to people... who may not be able to return home.'
Turkey now officially hosts the world's largest refugee community - about 1.6million, according the latest U.N. figures. 
As the war in neighboring Syria rages into its fifth year, the flow shows no sign of abating.
'We don't know how many more will be coming,' said Fuat Oktay, the chief of Turkey's disaster and emergency agency. 'There's a huge risk that the number might increase.'
Jolie and U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres met Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in the city of Midyat, some 30 miles from the Syrian border. She also attended a Ramadan fast-breaking dinner at a nearby camp and visited refugees.
This was Jolie's third visit to Turkey since 2011, when the conflict in Syria began. The war has displaced more than 3million refugees, or almost a fifth of the pre-war population.

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