These are some additional photos from the Geneva awards ceremony where Angelina Jolie was honored for her decade’s worth of work as a goodwill ambassador for the UNHCR. In addition to helping hand out the Nansen Refugee Award to a Yemeni refugee-advocacy and humanitarian organization, Jolie also made some comments designed to bring attention to the plight of Somali refugees – you can read her comments here.

When Jolie was honored (with a gold pin) for her UNHCR work, her speech gave the impression that she was simply going to be a goodwill ambassador for years to come. However, it seems like the UN wants to give Angelina a whole new role: Special Representative to the Afghan Refugee Crisis. She’s like the movie star version of (the late) Richard Holbrooke.

Angelina Jolie will be taking on a new role in the world’s most complex and dramatic refugee crises, the American actress and United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said Tuesday. UNHCR sources told Reuters that she would be named Special Representative on the Afghan refugee situation, to help resolve the fate of 2.7 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran.

Jolie, who has served for 10 years as goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and donated $5 million to its aid operations, declined to be specific, telling reporters: “We are looking at a few countries in the world.

“We’re hoping to discuss it in the next few weeks but we want to research it properly and do it well,” she said after addressing a meeting of UNHCR’s Executive Committee in Geneva.

Antonio Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told the talks that Jolie would become “our special envoy mainly for the most dramatic refugee situations that require a lot of advocacy” and to mobilize strong international support.

“We will be asking you to do more and more in this regard,” he said. Jolie’s diplomatic skills, vision and insights would be harnessed to tackle “some of the most complex problems we face.”

“VULNERABLE YET RESILIENT” REFUGEES

The Oscar-winning Jolie, dressed in black, said that refugees whom she had met during her 40 field missions for UNHCR in hotspots from Pakistan to Kenya were “among the most vulnerable and yet the most resilient people in the world.”

“My personal experiences with UNHCR have been moving, sometimes heartbreaking, but always rewarding and unforgettable,” she said.

Jolie, who makes her directorial debut with the Bosnian wartime romance film “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” due to be released in December, has six children.

On recent UNHCR missions to Malta and Tunisia, she met families who had fled their native Somalia only to be uprooted again by fresh conflict in Libya, she said.

“I tried to imagine what it must have been like for a mother with children. To risk her life at sea trying to get to Europe from North Africa,” she said, noting that some ruthless smugglers had been known to throw women and children overboard. She recalled a visit in March to the Afghan village of Qala Gadu, north of Kabul, where girls’ schools and teachers remain targets of violence. A girl named Sahira pledged to complete her studies through 12th grade if the actress helped build a school.

“It’s not hard to say yes, knowing that as an Afghan, her word is her bond. An education is her basic human right and she should not be denied it any longer. Sahira is the future of Afghanistan. After decades of displacement and many years of war, we are entering a defining moment for Afghanistan,” Jolie added.

The September 20 killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Kabul’s chief peace negotiator, derailed efforts to forge dialogue with the Taliban to end the 10-year war and raised fears of a dangerous widening of Afghanistan’s ethnic rifts.

Although millions of Afghans have returned home in the past decade, Pakistan and Iran still host 1.7 million and 1 million Afghan refugees, respectively, according to the agency. Jolie made a surprise appearance Monday night at the UNHCR’s ceremony to honor a Yemeni aid group credited with rescuing thousands of desperate Somali refugees who arrive in Yemen each year.

[From Reuters]

If she’s officially named “Special Representative” to the Afghan refugee crisis, it will be interesting to see what Jolie can do with a much narrower, more focused cause. My guess is that she would thrive in the role, under set parameters, but that she would miss traveling to refugee crises beyond Afghanistan. Still, Angelina loves Afghanistan and Pakistan – she’s made numerous goodwill trips (and USO trips to Kabul). One of her first trips with the UNHCR – before she even became a goodwill ambassador – was to the Afghan refugee camps in Northern Pakistan. And that was BEFORE 9/11.

Photos courtesy of the UNHCR & Fame.