Please, PLEASE, don’t get your news from George Clooney. Liberal celebrity activist George Clooney has in recent years become the dominant news source for many when it come to the complex situation between Sudan and South Sudan. His very public campaign to bring awareness to the genocide in Darfur has long been documented; with nearly every western media source reporting on his congressional testimonies and recent arrest outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington. This is one of the more unfortunate repercussions of our celebrity obsessed nation. Clooney’s new crusade is to bring to the public square a discussion on the increasingly dire situation in South Kordofan between the Sudanese army, the SPLA-N, and the Nuba people. If this is the first time that you are hearing of this problem, or if George Clooney first brought your attention to it, than you are not reading enough news. This has been widely reported by Al Jazeera English since the historic splitting of South Sudan from the North. Below is a recent program on Al Jazeera on what is going on in the Nuba Mountains.
The two civil war’s between the North and the South lasted 37 years. The most recent civil war lasted from 1985-2005 and would displace 4,000,000 people as well as take the lives of 2,000,000. As Folly Bah Tibault explains in the very beginning of the Al Jazeera English special, “The conflict was fought over differences in ideology, politics, resources, land, and oil”. Don’t let George Clooney be your guide through something this complicated.
Porkins Policy Review 