"Confronting George Clooney’s Critics on South Sudan"

[applegrove]

Confronting George Clooney’s Critics on South Sudan

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/07/confronting-george-clooney-s-critics-on-south-sudan.html

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This controlled embrace of the paparazzi on Clooney’s wedding day was motivated by charity rather than the typical celebrity cash grab. All proceeds are going to Clooney’s newest attempt to combat mass atrocities in Africa—a spin-off of his ambitious and effective Satellite Sentinel initiative, which will be directed at following the money that funds massacres.

Tucked away in some remote corner of the newsstand you might find a decidedly different Clooney cover story—a print issue of Newsweek with an article titled “George Clooney, South Sudan and How the World’s Newest Nation Imploded.”

The story is an extract from an e-book by Alex Perry which details the humanitarian roots of South Sudan’s independence and subsequent bloody struggles, weaving it into a tale of well-intentioned but ultimately doomed western interventions across the decades. Clooney is the celluloid straw man—an out-sized outsider whose determination to “do something” ended up propelling the birth of a nation that was not ready for freedom.

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Clooney’s commitment to South Sudan has continued. His SatSentinel, a privately funded, publically accessible satellite executed through the Enough Project, DigitalGlobe, and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative has documented real-time troop build-ups along contested borders between the north and south and provided indelible evidence of slaughters and razed villages. He’s leveraged his commercial status as a spokesman for Nescafe in Europe to convince the company to invest significantly in the production of coffee in South Sudan, which was a major cash crop there before the civil war. Coffee is now the second largest export from South Sudan, after oil. And his newest project, which the sale of his wedding photos will help fund, promises to track the assets that have been stolen from the South Sudan treasury to fuel the fighting. By any measure, this sustained support is evidence that one person can make a difference, not out of short-term self-interest but a long-term belief that winning the peace is every bit as essential as winning a war. If someone wants to dismiss this as do-goodism, fine, but it has real world effects.



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