George Clooney has addressed Congress following his trip to Sudan last week.
Clooney visited rebel-held territory in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains as part of a trip with the ENOUGH Project, and witnessed rocket attacks and the effects of aerial bombing by the Sudanses regime against the Nuban people. He wrote and directed a graphis and disturbing film about the trip, which can be seen here.
Clooney named President Omar al-Bashir, Defense Minister Abdeirahim Mohamed Hussein and government official Ahmad Harun as being behind the attacks.
“They’re all charged with war crimes and are now proving themselves to be the greatest war criminals of this century by far,” he said. “What you see is a constant drip of fear. We found children filled with shrapnel, including a 9-year-old boy who had both of his hands blown off.”
“There’s a difference between two armies fighting and what the Geneva Convention calls war crimes,” Clooney told a council on foreign policy in New York earlier this week. “We saw that very specifically happening on two occasions: rape, starvation, lack of humanitarian aid. They’re scaring the hell out of these people and they’re killing, hoping and trying to get them just to leave.”
Clooney spoke to CNN prior to his appearance in Congress: "We’re meeting in Congress because the House is trying to pass a bill right now that has a very good chance of passing that has some pretty robust sanctions. We’re hoping the Senate will do the same. The truth is, there is a lot of ways to attack this problem.
“One is to do what we did with terrorist groups, which is go after the money, find where the money is. These guys are not buying their weapons with Sudanese pounds. So find their offshore accounts in Malaysia, places like that, and freeze them.
“The other way is to actually work with China, not try to guilt them, but work with them to say, ‘Listen, you guys are losing 6% of your oil import right now from the Sudan because they’ve shut off the oil. Let’s work together to find a way to get that oil turned back on by fixing these problems.’ "
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