Jolie Scolds West On Refugee Treatment

Angelina Jolie sees Western nations as being indifferent to refugees and finds that shocking.

"It's a scandal, really, in such a rich world, that we are not even finding a way to help feed refugee families properly," the Academy Award-winning actress and U.N. goodwill ambassador wrote in Refugees, a quarterly magazine published by the U.N. refugee agency.

She said Europeans, who six decades ago were confronted by 40 million refugees in the aftermath of World War II, have turned their backs on victims of tyrannical regimes. Jolie also criticized Americans and Australians.

"Agencies like UNHCR (the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees) should not really have to struggle to scrape a few tens of millions of dollars together to help rebuild shattered nations — like Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia and south Sudan," Jolie said. "But we won't pay for a full cure."

The 31-year-old Jolie, who has made more than 30 missions for the agency since becoming goodwill ambassador in 2001, described her shock over a photo printed in an edition of Refugees earlier this year capturing a couple on a beach while disregarding a black man washed ashore.

"They can't see the stark reality lying a few yards further up the beach," she wrote. "We are all — myself included — behaving like the couple sitting under their umbrella on the beach, gazing studiously out to sea."