NAIROBI, Kenya — Actor George Clooney and a group of U.S. genocide scholars are warning that war crimes are taking place in an obscure conflict in Sudan’s southern region.
Clooney has long worked to prevent conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, and he co-founded a group that uses satellite imagery to monitor acts of war there. That group, the Satellite Sentinel Project, said Thursday that 26 villages were intentionally set on fire last month by Sudanese forces.
“Razing a village is a war crime, and the torching of now at least 26 Nuban villages, plus the systematic destruction of crops and grasslands for cattle, is a crime against humanity,” Clooney said.
Sudanese troops are fighting rebels in the Nuba Mountains who were once aligned with what is now South Sudan. When South Sudan peacefully broke away from Sudan last year, after decades of civil war, the rebels’ region was placed on the Sudan side, though many there say they wish they would have been put with South Sudan.
Antonov airplanes have routinely bombed the rebels’ region over the past year, resulting in farmers fleeing their fields.
John Prendergast, a co-founder of the satellite project, said Sudan is carrying out a strategy of “starvation warfare.” More than 100,000 Nuba residents have fled across the border to refugee camps in South Sudan.
