Clooney lobbies US administration to help stop violence in Sudan
Actor and activist George Clooney personally
lobbied the US President on Thursday for help to stop the violence along
the border between Sudan and South Sudan.
Continuing his campaign to draw attention to the ongoing humanitarian
crisis in southern Sudan, actor and activist George Clooney personally
lobbied the US President on Thursday for help to stop the violence along
the border between Sudan and South Sudan.Speaking to reporters after his meeting with Barack Obama, Clooney said that "with the escalation of danger for the people in the Nuba Mountains, there is a real concern of opening some form of a humanitarian corridor."
Acknowledging that the United States could not implement unilateral action, Clooney urged other countries to assist in the humanitarian effort.
Clooney said that during an upcoming meeting between Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao later this month, Obama said he would specifically discuss humanitarian relief.
In the second recent YouTube video to highlight an African conflict, Clooney made an illegal and dangerous trip to the southern reaches of Sudan, where the actor witnesses what an American activist said on Thursday was likely a Chinese-made missile sail overhead.
Clooney's four-minute video highlights attacks on civilians in Sudan's Nuba Mountains, a region that US officials say could soon suffer a severe hunger crisis.
The video comes about a week after a YouTube sensation about Joseph Kony, the leader of the brutal Central Africa militia the Lord's Resistance Army.
In the Clooney video, which he wrote and directed, a man from the Nuba tribe is seen pushing Clooney to take cover after a rocket sails overhead. Mothers carrying children and young children running with water containers can be seen moving toward the rock caves.
Ryan Boyette, an American who lives in the Nuba Mountains, said Sudan's military has been launching large, Chinese-made rockets against civilians rather than military forces with the rebel group known as the SPLM-N.
The SPLM-N was or is aligned with the military in South Sudan, a new country that broke away from Sudan last year after decades of civil war.
The Nuba Mountains were partitioned with the north although the black population there is ethnically and in some cases religiously different than the mostly Arab north. South Sudan says it has severed ties with the SPLM-N, but Sudan accuses it of continuing to aid SPLM-N fighters
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