22 Time July 19/July 26, 2021
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.
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
Women line up for water at Goudoubo camp in
Burkina Faso, on June 20TheView Opener
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. “Oh for a roof for a
small child from the Sahel, and help for
him not to suffer fear.”
Humanitarian aid is no substitute
for a livelihood, and the funding trick-
ling into the country doesn’t come close
to matching the scale of the suffering.
The U.N. appeal for Burkina Faso is less
than a quarter funded. This means that
UNHCR and partners have only beenable to provide shelter—a basic plastic
tent with a wood frame—to 1 in 10 dis-
placed people in the country.
As my visit progressed, a feeling of
dread took hold of me. It felt like I was
glimpsing the future. I’ve made more
than 60 visits to refugees globally in the
past 20 years. I’ve watched as political
solutions to conflicts have dried up for
an ever growing population of forcibly
displaced people and their children—
born displaced or stateless, passing their
entire childhoods in limbo.
Wars no longer seem to end; they
simply shift, just as al-Qaeda and the
Islamic State have shifted their opera-
tions from Afghanistan and the Middle
East to the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Af-
rica. Meanwhile, the number of forcibly
displaced people has doubled globally
in a decade, to more than 80 million
people. Looking back on those lost de-
cades, it is as if everything was leading
us to the kind of conflict now seen in
Burkina Faso, combining the reality of a
protracted war fueled by terrorism.
These threats are made worse by thedevastating effects of man-made cli-
mate change. African nations have gen-
erated only a tiny fraction of the emis-
sions heating our planet. Yet in Burkina
Faso, arable land and their natural water
supplies are drying up at a terrifying
rate, making it next to impossible for
families that have farmed the earth for
generations to feed their children. One
Malian refugee, who had fled to Burkina
Faso with his family and their livestock,
described how their cows died one by
one from the lack of grazing and water.
We had decades to try to prevent
conflicts from breaking out or to
find peace agreements to enable
refugees to return to their home
countries. We now face the
prospect that climate-change
effects will mean there is no home
for displaced people to return to.
Governments in wealthy indus-
trialized nations act as if refugees
can be treated as someone else’s
problem if they simply fortify their
borders or pay developing nations
to continue to host millions of dis-
placed people. They make shiny
new humanitarian announcements
to distract voters, and themselves,
from decades of unkept promises.
The hypocrisy makes it harder to hold
to account governments that commit
mass atrocities against their own people,
causing them to flee.
At which point will we be concerned
enough to recognize that the model
is broken as well as immoral? When
100 million people are displaced? Or
200 million, a number we could reach
within the next 20 years?
As citizens, we need to shift our
thinking. We’re learning to understand
the human cost of the minerals mined
in conflict zones to meet our demand
for smartphones and the environmen-
tal cost of manufacturing our clothes.
Our foreign policies—the promises we
break, the allies we indulge, the excep-
tions we make and the atrocities we
overlook—also carry a vast human cost.
That price is being paid by millions of
children like Ag Mossa.Jolie is an Academy Award–winning
actor and Special Envoy of the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees