Actress Mia Farrow dances with a child Saturday in Bangui, the capital city of Central African Republic. SCHALK VAN ZUYDAM: AP
Posted on 02/11/2007 12:17:09 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Actress Mia Farrow dances with a child Saturday in Bangui, the capital city of Central African Republic. SCHALK VAN ZUYDAM: AP
BANGUI, Central African Republic — Shaking hands with droves of cheering street children, Mia Farrow began a weeklong tour of the Central African Republic on Saturday to draw attention — and aid — to one of the world's forgotten crises.
The 62-year-old actress and U.N. goodwill ambassador will visit some of the 150,000 people displaced by the nation's simmering conflict and tour northern towns recently ravaged by fighting close to the borders with Chad and Sudan's troubled Darfur region.
"It's called a forgotten crisis, a forgotten humanitarian crisis, but forgotten implies that it was once remembered," Farrow told The Associated Press in an interview in the country's capital of dirt roads and tumbledown, tin-roofed buildings. "I'm not sure it was in anyone's consciousness ... it's undetected."
More than a year of instability in the impoverished nation's northeast boiled over into a rebellion in October in which insurgents captured several towns. French-backed government troops recaptured the towns in early December, but they have been accused of burning villages to flush out insurgents.
A separate rebel group has also launched attacks in the northwest.
The United Nations says the violence has affected 1 million people, nearly one-quarter of the country's population, and that tens of thousands of women have been raped by different factions. The Central African Republic government has accused Sudan of backing the northeastern rebels, but Khartoum has denied the accusations.
On Saturday, Farrow visited dozens of street children at a UNICEF-sponsored project and met President Francois Bozize, who led a rebel army that overthrew the previous government in 2003 and was elected president two years later.
"He was completely frank. He said, 'We feel abandoned, we're desperately in need of help. There is only so much we can do here and we're doing all of it,'" Farrow said.
An impoverished country nearly the size of Texas, the Central African Republic has been wracked by coups and army mutinies since independence from France in 1960.
Media....tools of, by, and for....our enemies!!!!
:-(
The UN sponsors schools around the world that are anti-American and anti-Israel.
Yes. The same ones that cuddle up to Castro and to Chavez.
She looks good. Very, very good!
Creating each future crisis we need to fight. Job security.
I'm sure she's glad you aprove.
She almost has a chest.
#5 Yes and to our other enemies as well.
U.S. actress Mia Farrow hands a baby back to its mother, in the town of Birao, situated around 55 kilometers (34 miles) from the border with Sudan, in the Central African Republic, Sunday, Feb. 11, 2007. U.S. actress Mia Farrow began a weeklong tour Saturday of Central African Republic saying she wanted to draw attention - and aid - to one of the world's most forgotten crises. (AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam)
Yeah the rich folks go down slumming and show how much they care, then they return to their Comfortable life. Their duty done.
I am altogether too close to Hollywood. Alaska is a mere 4000 miles away and the emanations are still strong.
Fight it.
Too bad the UN is perpetrator of much of the violence on the African continent.
Can't. Can you tell a brown bear to stay away from the salmon stream? Sure, but can he? Should he?
All too true.
The consequences are what they are.
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