ISLAMABAD, May 7: The goodwill ambassador of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Angelina Jolie, on Saturday asked the international community to pay attention to the refugee problem which, she said, had slipped back in media priorities owing to the Iraq war coverage.

Speaking at a news conference at the end of her four-day visit to Pakistan, she said the Iraq war had also caused diversion of funds from projects of refugees.

Ms Jolie, an Oscar-winning Hollywood actress, dismissed proposals for relocation of refugee camps along the border areas of Pakistan.

Referring to President Pervez Musharraf’s suggestion, she said the president did not talk about shifting all the refugee camps but some of the encampments. She pointed out that moving families from one camp to another instead of finding a permanent solution to the problem was a retrogressive step.

Appreciating Islamabad’s role to host refugees for the past 25 years, she said the burden on Pakistani people had been very large but they had not been given the assistance they should have received.

She said no figures were available about the exact number of refugees as a proper census had never been done and added that many of the refugees had come back to Pakistan after crossing over to Afghanistan for lack of adequate opportunities in the war-ravaged country.

The UN goodwill ambassador said that in order to check the cross-border movement of refugees the UNHCR was implementing an iris scanning programme by taking retinal images of refugees before their entry into Afghanistan. She hoped the measure would help identify the refugees trying to use the new system in a negative way and said such refugees would be dealt with accordingly.

Emphasizing the need for reconstruction and development works in Afghanistan, she said such activities must pick up pace, especially in rural areas.

She asked the international community to assist in the education and health-care systems where a lot was needed to be done.

Ms Jolie said it was painful to see that refugee children had to work in brick kilns and added that fighting poverty was an enormous question which had to be tackled in a global way.