2015-10-14
254
Editorial
Without Angelina Jolie… representatives of 140 countries would not be gathering in London to try to make a difference
Angelina Jolie, who is co-hosting the conference on ending sexual violence in conflict that opens today in London, is a highly regarded, very highly paid, Oscar-winning film actor with a burgeoning career as a director. She is also hyper-beautiful and – killer blow – half of a celebrity couple. To some people that excludes her from doing pretty well anything that might be described as worthwhile, like being a champion of the millions of women who have been raped, mutilated and abused, the casual collateral of too many wars.
The writer Paul Theroux accuses her and people like her of seeking "a landscape on which [they] can sketch a new personality". On these very pages, she has been accused of vanity and hypocrisy. The cult of celebrity, this narrative implies, is trivial and the people on whom it is centred are trivial too. They cannot, therefore, engage with the serious except as a tawdry act of self-promotion that ends up trivialising things that actually matter. This is an absurd generalisation that damages the many well-intentioned efforts of famous people and belittles the energy, compassion and commitment that have distinguished Angelina Jolie's campaign.
As T.S. Eliot put it, to do the right deed for the wrong reason raises an interesting moral question. But if even the fleeting attention of a star like Madonna to, say, extreme poverty in Africa can inspire more people to act to alleviate it, then it is hard to condemn merely because some of the glow of philanthropy will benefit her. There may be an argument, too, about celebrity over-simplifying complex issues. There may be a debate about the value of particular campaigns. But not, surely, about the need for attention in the first place.
Angelina Jolie brings much more than glamour to this week’s conference. She has taken a profound interest in the impunity of the men who rape women and children – and boys and men – as a weapon of war. Her study of the experience of Muslim women in Bosnia, raped repeatedly by Serb soldiers in a determined effort to impregnate them with "Christian" babies, led to her directoral debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, which was described by the Guardian’s reviewer as "born out of scrupulous research and deeply held conviction".
Plenty of controversy surrounds the high ambition of the London conference. There are charges for the co-host William Hague to answer about Britain’s laggardly approach to women seeking refuge here who have been victims of sexual violence in conflict. But what is not in doubt is that without the commitment of Angelina Jolie and her determination to find a framework in which justice for the victims becomes at least possible, representatives of 140 countries would not be gathering in London to try to make a difference.
