Pretty Loud

SARAJEVO (AFP) –
Film stars Angelina Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt flew into Bosnia on a surprise visit to meet refugees still suffering from the brutal 1992-1995 civil war, an official said Monday.

“They are in Bosnia to visit the sites run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),” local UNHCR spokeswoman Aida Prljaca told AFP.

Bosnian National radio said the couple went to a refugee centre in the eastern town of Gorazde, where they visited two families who had fled their homes during the conflict and had yet to return, almost 15 years after the end of the war.

“I was surprised when I recognized him. I could not say anything, I was so moved,” one mother, whose name was not revealed, said of her meeting with Pitt.

“He came to me and took me in his arms. He was also surprised when I told him that I had recognized him and he was very moved with my personal history. He gave me some money,” the unemployed mother of one told the radio.

More than three years of war left 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million refugees and displaced persons. Some 117,000 people are still displaced or unable to return to their homes, according to the UNHCR.

After a day in Bosnia, the couple flew into the coastal town Tivat in Montenegro, airport officials said.

Local media speculated Jolie, a UNHCR good-will ambassador, and Pitt would spend a day in one of Montenegro’s luxurious hotels or visit the famed Croatian coastal town of Dubrovnik.

Jolie and Pitt have not been seen in public since Bosnian border police announced that a famous Hollywood couple had arrived late Sunday.

Prljaca said their visit to Bosnia would be discreet, without any contact with media, and that the UNHCR would likely issue a statement later in the day.

Dozens of photographers staked out the luxury Hotel Europe in the centre of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo overnight Sunday, said an AFP photographer.

A local photographer of news portal Visegrad24.info managed to take a photo of the pair, dressed in black, in the eastern Bosnian village of Medjedja, near Visegrad.

The couple flew into Sarajevo from Venice, where Jolie is working alongside Johnny Depp on the film “The Tourist“, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who was behind the critically acclaimed 2007 German film “The Lives of Others“.