UN refugee agency ambassador Angelina Jolie documents visit to displaced Chechens

Actress Angelina Jolie, a Goodwill Ambassador of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), has released a new online journal documenting her mission to the Russian Federation, where she met displaced Chechens as well as refugees in Moscow and North Ossetia.

For four days last August, Ms. Jolie travelled to the republic of Ingushetia in the North Caucasus, meeting Ingush President Murat Zyazikov and displaced Chechens living in camps. Her journal reflects both the displaced people's fears about security in Chechnya and the authorities' view of the situation.

"I know that if thousands of people were dying every day in California, London or New York, it would be very different. But most of these people are in places like Africa, Chechnya, the Balkans, Central Asia and Colombia, and maybe the world is used to hearing about their deaths? Is it old news? Are they too many? Or is it that they have nothing we feel to give to us in return? Which is of course wrong because they have everything to offer," she writes in the journal.

"At the end of the day, what should that matter, we are equal,” she concludes. “They are families like us. And they need our help, our support. And in areas like Chechnya, they need us not to forget."

Ms. Jolie also writes of her concern for humanitarian personnel – from a long list of aid workers attacked in the Caucasus region to those killed when the UN headquarters in Baghdad was bombed just days before the start of her mission.