Why George Clooney Was Arrested Last Week
By Eric Reeves
23 March, 2012
The international community is failing the people of South Kordofan and Blue Nile, Sudan; civil
disobedience before Khartoum's embassy in Washington became a moral imperative
Hollywood human rights advocacy will always have to contend with the sneering, knowing contempt of
many a professional observer, especially when the subject is Sudan. But it would behoove such
observers to listen to what George Clooney actually said last week about the border regions of Sudan,
first before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; then to President Obama—who is sorely in need of
prodding on this issue; and finally to the news media following his arrest for civil disobedience before the
Sudanese embassy (Friday March 16). The arrest has predictably been characterized as grandstanding;
in fact, however, Clooney felt it to be a moral imperative.
First it should be noted that Clooney has consistently declared that he himself is not and has not tried to
become an "expert" on Sudan; he understands that he is a "megaphone"(to borrow one of his own
metaphors); he is explicit about all this, and his directness and honesty about what is central in debates
about "star power advocacy" deserve to be fully credited. Moreover by contrast, John Prendergast---who
has worked closely with Clooney and accompanied him on all his trips to Sudan, including to the July 9,
2011 Independence Day celebration in Juba---has deep Africa experience in the advocacy world, the
policy world(International Crisis Group), and the world of the State Department and theNational Security
Council. He has extensive field experience in Sudan, and few have studied Sudan for more years with a
clearer understanding of what is represented by the Khartoum regime.
What Clooney himself said of substance was, in effect, quite simple (I paraphrase):
"I've been to Sudan and the region a number of times; this time I made the trip to the highly volatile border
between (northern) Sudan and the new Republic of South Sudan. I also traveled to the Nuba Mountains
of South Kordofan, a war zone, and witnessed and recorded substantial evidence of war crimes."
What Clooney did not say but easily might have is that all his most important substantive points had
already been chronicled with devastating authority---and almost no impact---by Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, the Satellite Sentinel Project, and UN human rights investigators who last June
were in Kadugli (South Kordofan), the epicenter of widespread ethnic slaughter. And even before these
searing indictments of the Khartoum regime, we had numerous news dispatches. These revealed that
the signature feature of Khartoum's operation was a door-to-door roundup of Nuba, who were often
summarily shot. The Nuba, the name for the African tribal grouping in central South Kordofan, were also
stopped at checkpoints grimly similar to those once seen in Rwanda. One aid worker who had recently
escaped from South Kordofan, told McClatchyNews, "Those [Nuba] coming in are saying, 'Whenever they
see you are a black person, they kill you.'" Another Nuba aid worker reported that an Arab militia leader
made clear that their orders were simple: to "just clear."
Yet another Nuba resident of Kadugli told Agence France-Presse that he had been informed by a
member of the paramilitary Popular Defense Forces that they had been provided plenty of weapons and
ammunition, and a standing order: "He said that they had clear instructions: just sweep away the rubbish.
If you see a Nuba, just clean it up. … He told me he saw two trucks of people with their hands tied and
blindfolded, driving out to where diggers were making holes for graves on the edge of town."
Mass gravesites, capable of holding many thousands of dead bodies, were identified by the Satellite
Sentinel Project by means of grimly unambiguous satellite photography reported on July 14 and August
17. Though greeted with skepticism by Obama's special envoy for Sudan, Princeton Lyman, evidence
continued to pour in, both from the ground and further satellite imagery. And a leaked report from the UN
human rights team appeared in early July, offering further eyewitness accounts. Among scores of
individual observations the UN report highlights:
"On 10 June, UNMIS [UN Mission in Sudan]Human Rights interviewed residents from Murta village,
outside of Kadugli Town, who stated that they saw fresh mass graves located in a valley southeast of the
Murta bus station near the Kadugli police training centre." (§35)
"[Two men interviewed by UNMIS] reported that, following their release from SAF [Sudan Armed Forces]
custody, they saw fresh mass graves between the SAF 14th Division Headquarters and Kadugli Market.
On 16 June, UN military observers, while on their way between the SAF14th Division Headquarters and
Kadugli Market in an attempt to verify the existence of these mass graves, were arrested, stripped of their
clothes, and believed that they were about to be executed when a senior SAF officer intervened."(§36)
Reports from authoritative sources on the ground reaching SSP revealed that mass graves had been
anticipated, as had the need for body bags and tarps to prevent (if unsuccessfully) aerial identification. A
July1 report released by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
confirmed that" the Sudan Red Crescent Society, reportedly acting on instructions from the Government
of South Kordofan, has been actively collecting dead bodies in Kadugli town, and had at least 415 body
bags and 2,000 plastic tarps recently transferred to it from the IFRC prior to the fighting in June. By the
end of June, the SRCS was publicly saying it needed more body bags." (emphasis added)
The "Government of South Kordofan"is headed by Ahmed Haroun, who has been indicted by the
International Criminal Court on multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. He
was appointed by Khartoum to his position in South Kordofan precisely because of his well-earned
reputation for utter ruthlessness and brutality.
From the Nuba Mountains, where indiscriminate aerial attacks were concentrated, The Independent
reported in July:
"The government in Khartoum insists it is targeting armed rebels but the Antonovs it is using are nonmilitary aircraft and are randomly destructive. 'The worst injuries are from the Antonovs,' saidDr [Tom]
Catena. 'This is my first experience of war and you don't understand the human toll until you see it. These
people are being destroyed for nothing.' The only qualified doctor in an area with hundreds of thousands
people, the mission hospital has about 400 patients. The doctor who arrived recently from mission work in
Kenya said he was nervous at first about speaking out as hospitals were targets. 'Why hold back?' he
asked. 'We should show what's happening, this is the reality.'"
In his comments Clooney also highlighted, with appropriate urgency, the larger implications of such aerial
attacks on civilians in the Nuba---attacks that he witnessed. Here again the world has been warned for
many months by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, SSP and others. Moreover, we have
known that this same regime in Khartoum has relentlessly bombed civilian and humanitarian targets
throughout Sudan for over a decade. In South Kordofan and Blue Nile these widespread and systematic
attacks have disrupted and badly compromised both early summer planting and fall harvests, contributing
to an extremely dangerous food shortage in both regions. Clooney's most impassioned plea was that this
shortage be addressed on an urgent basis.
And yet despite the nature of these crimes, despite an ongoing "genocide by attrition" in Darfur, despite
Khartoum's campaign of ethnic annihilation in the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s,and despite Khartoum's
barbarous conduct of war against South Sudan, which claimed more than 2 million civilian lives and
displacedas many as five million others---despite all this the Obama administration continues to believe
that it can negotiate profitably with this cruel and obdurate regime:
"Frankly, we do not want to see the ouster of the [Sudanese] regime, nor regime change. We want to
seethe regime carrying out reform via constitutional democratic measures."
The idea that the brutal and ruthlessly survivalist National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime,
with its record of serial genocide as a counterinsurgency strategy, can oversee "reform via constitutional
democratic measures" is so preposterous as to leave us with no conclusion but that the Obama
administration has utterly lost its moral and diplomatic bearings when it comes to Sudan. We have
abundant photographic, narrative, and forensic records making unambiguously clear that a wide range of
atrocity crimes, including crimes against humanity, have been perpetrated by a regime that has never
indicated the slightest interest in democracy.
We have, in short, known for more than nine months what was happening in South Kordofan and Blue
Nile; we have known that human beings were again being destroyed and displaced into highly precarious
existences because of their ethnicity. But yet again, knowing has meant nothing: knowing has done
nothing to mitigate the enormous ongoing risks to many hundreds of thousands of human lives; knowing
alone has generated no appropriate policy response---by the U.S. or other international actors of
consequence. And that such knowledge has meant nothing---that the Obama administration continues to
frame its Sudan policy around the viciously disingenuous expectation that Khartoum will "carry out
reformvia constitutional democratic measures"---this is why George Clooney was arrested.
[Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College, has published extensively on Sudan, nationally and
internationally, for more than a decade. He is author of A Long Day's Dying: Critical Moments in the
Darfur
Dear Eric,
It is good that Clooney used his starpower to be a megaphone. But as Rafael Medoff has written, he
should have demonstrated and gotten himself arrested in front of the White House and the State
Department. When interviewed on Fox News by Chris Wallace, he tergiversated, weaved, bobbed etc etc
on questions on holding the Administration accountable for their paralysis. I have written over and over
again that on genocidal threats, Obama's clenched fist has morphed into a limp wrist. The responsibility
for Princeton Lyman's willful blindness rests with his direct boss--the Secretary of State, and her boss, the
President. Princeton Lyman is a pawn.
Genocide results from human choice and bystander indifference. We are seeing the interface between
evil choices by both perpetrator and bystander.
Clooney has zero influence in Sudan---but he does have direct personal access to the President and the
State Dept. What we are seeing here is genocide shadowboxing, which is the story of the failure to stop
the genocide in Darfur going back to 2003 -2004. This shadowboxing is part of a longer scenario of
appeasing the star players of the Islamist Axis of Genocide- Iran, Syria, and Sudan --and ethnic
butchery-- a euphemism for genocide From 2004 ff, Prendergast --and for that matter the whole infantile
Safe Darfur campaign, has shadowboxed on the need for military action to stop Sudan. The reason for
this shadowboxing, as Greg Stanton has pointed out, is that the funders for their lavish campaign forbade
them from calling for military action.
Let's call a spade a spade. And let's connect the dots-- we are now seeing the emergence of an axis of
Jihadist regimes which are smart, determined, and very nasty- know how to help each other, and gain the
support and protection of Russia and China, the two big time enablers, and much of the post-Arab Spring
Muslim world.
It is time for a paradigm shift. Go after the bystanders as well as the perpetrators. All of us to use our
prestige and knowledge to make these points as they impinge on Sudan. Let's give Clooney and
Prendergast a map of the Washington Metro and walking instructions to the White House and State
Department. Until they demonstrate there, they are posturing. What about Clooney fasting in front of the
White House?
Prof. Elihu Richter
Hebrew University
Jerusalem