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.
