NAIROBI, Kenya — In the second YouTube video in a week to highlight an African conflict, George Clooney makes an illegal and dangerous trip to the southern reaches of Sudan, where the actor witnesses what a U.S. activist said 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 U.S. officials say could soon suffer a severe hunger crisis. The video comes about a week after a viral YouTube video about Joseph Kony, leader of Central Africa’s brutal Lord’s Resistance Army.
In the Clooney video, which he wrote and directed, a man from the Nuba community is seen pushing Clooney to take cover after a rocket sails overhead. Mothers carrying children and young children lugging water jugs can be seen moving toward the rock caves.
Ryan Boyette, an American living in the Nuba Mountains, said Sudan’s military has been launching large, Chinese-made rockets against civilians — not the military forces with the rebel group known as the SPLM-N. Boyette said most of the victims are caught off-guard because they don’t know rockets are approaching.
Clooney testified Wednesday about the situation in Sudan before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On Thursday, he visited the White House. He said afterward he was optimistic that the president would press Chinese leader Hu Jintao to join global efforts to bring peace to the ravaged region when the two meet later this month at a nuclear-security summit in South Korea.
