: Angelina Jolie: We Need to Understand the Human Cost of Burkina Faso’s Refugee Crisis #WorldNEWS Burkina Faso is gripped by a war we seldom hear about, even though Western nations had a hand in its

Angelina Jolie: We Need to Understand the Human Cost of Burkina Faso’s Refugee Crisis #WorldNEWS
Burkina Faso is gripped by a war we seldom hear about, even though Western nations had a hand in its creation. Until the NATO bombing campaign in Libya in 2011, the West African nation had enjoyed decades of peace and, though it faced challenges including endemic poverty, was considered a beacon of stability in the Sahel region.
After the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s government, militants and weapons flooded southwest across the Sahara and into Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. By 2015, those guns had been turned by extremist groups upon villagers, cattle herders and children in rural Burkina Faso. More than 1. 2 million Burkinabe people have fled their homes because of the intensifying violence. Camps for refugees from neighboring Mali have also been brutally attacked.
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In the days before I arrived, militants attacked a village in the north of Burkina Faso and executed at least 138 people. Separately, a convoy of the U. N. Refugee Agency and partners came under fire traveling to a refugee camp I was due to visit. It was my first experience with the insecurity experienced daily by the Burkinabe people. Most of the families I met had moved several times, with nowhere truly safe for them.
A striking number of the outwardly calm men I met told me that they lived in a constant state of terror. Many of the displaced had seen male relatives murdered for refusing to join the armed groups.
I was visiting Burkina Faso with the U. N. Refugee Agency, to mark June 20—World Refugee Day—with displaced people. I’ve taken a trip like this nearly every year for the past two decades, but this journey felt different. I had to keep moving, spending only a short while in each location, because of the high risk from terrorist groups. I traveled by road from the capital Ouagadougou to Kaya, a city that is home to some 110,000 displaced people. The next day we flew—the road judged unsafe because of roadside bombs—to Dori, and then made the 10-minute drive to Goudoubo refugee camp in the remote, isolated and arid north of the country, close to the border with Mali.
It is a measure of their grace that not a single person I met in Burkina Faso called out the role Western intervention in Libya played in fueling the instability that plagues their country. In Goudoubo camp, I met 16-year-old Ag Mossa, a poet and refugee from Mali. He asked me if my children were in school, and when I said yes, he congratulated them. Schools are a prime target of militants in the Sahel, and millions of children across the region are missing out on their education as a result. Ag Mossa gave me one of his poems. “These little verses are a cry from the heart,” he wrote.