Hollywood movie star George Clooney has been arrested at Sudan's embassy in Washington at a protest about the escalating emergency in Sudan.
The Sudanese government has been blocking humanitarian aid from reaching a volatile border region where hundreds of thousands of people are short of food.
Clooney, his father Nick and other activists ignored three police warnings to leave the embassy grounds and were led away in plastic handcuffs to a waiting van by uniformed members of the Secret Service, a journalist covering the demonstration said.
"We need humanitarian aid to be allowed into the Sudan before it becomes the worst humanitarian crisis in the world," Clooney told reporters just before his arrest.
"The second thing we are here to ask is for the government in Khartoum to stop randomly killing its own innocent men, women and children. Stop raping them and stop starving them. That's all we ask."
Clooney, who on Wednesday was a guest at the White House banquet in honour of British prime minister David Cameron, posted bail with several others and walked free later on Friday.
"You never know if you are accomplishing anything ... We hope it helps," Clooney told reporters after his release, adding that the arrest was his first and "let's hope it's my last".
Activists have drawn parallels between the current crisis in Sudan's Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile provinces with the violence almost a decade ago in the western region of Darfur, where Khartoum sparked international condemnation by violently suppressing a rebellion in a conflict that the United Nations estimates killed some 300,000 people.
The United States has voiced serious concerns about the deteriorating conditions in the border region, where Sudanese troops are fighting rebels aligned with its newly independent neighbour South Sudan.
Clooney, who recently visited the area, told a Senate hearing this week that Sudan's forces were launching repeated attacks on unarmed civilians and preventing aid from reaching a region where US officials say as many as 250,000 people face severe food shortages.
Clooney, a long-time celebrity activist critical of the Khartoum government, had been expected to provoke police into arresting him.
Protest organisers said that others arrested on Friday included several US congressmen, the son of slain US civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr, and veteran human rights campaigner John Prendergast, the co-founder of the Enough Project.
No comments:
Post a Comment