Mick Hartley

As the protests in Khartoum against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir enter their sixth week – the Sudan spring? – a snide piece in the Guardian by Nesrine Malik asked Where are George Clooney and co now that Sudan needs them?

Every day brings fresh tales of bloodshed and loss, videos of mothers wild with grief when their children’s bodies are brought home, and yet every day the Sudanese people leave their homes and workplaces and march into a storm of bullets and tear gas. It is no longer about inflation. For the past 30 years, corruption, ethnic division, impoverishment to the benefit of a networked few, and religious oppression have gripped the country. And death. So much death. In wars in the south, east and west of the country, in the government’s own “ghost houses” and torture cells, and in the wards of hospitals, where babies have died for want of an oxygen canister. The rising anger has burst its banks and has nowhere to flow but into the streets, deluging the government and its security forces, and seriously threatening its survival for the first time.

And yet, the Sudan human rights community that secured an international criminal court arrest warrant for Bashir on charges of war crimes, and lobbied to the last minute against the lifting of sanctions, does not seem as exercised by these developments. This is the closest the government has come to collapsing, and those who supposedly fought for this for years are missing in action.  […]

And now, when those people finally rise up, paying with their lives to remove a government that several western campaigns have failed to vanquish, the moral market seems to be closed. There is no narrative, you see, no ethnic angle, no religious angle, no duality that an advocate can wedge themselves between and sell. It’s just a good old fashioned uprising in a dusty Saharan country where the virtue dividends for an intermediary are low.

Virtue dividends? Ouch. Those shallow virtue-signalling celebs must have moved on to other more exciting stuff.

Except they haven't. George Clooney and John Prendegast have replied in today's Guardian:

Over more than a dozen years, we’ve invested millions of dollars into efforts to address Sudan’s – and South Sudan’s – crises. We launched the Satellite Sentinel Project to monitor the regime’s mass atrocities using satellite technology and teams of imagery analysts. We were able to uncover evidence of mass graves, Chinese-made rockets, hidden troop movements in violations of ceasefires, and many other destabilising actions of the Sudan regime.

But over time, we realised that naming and shaming the regime and exposing its complicity in mass atrocities were not having sufficient impact on the policies of governments in Europe, America and Africa, so we decided on a new approach.

We assessed the most significant point of vulnerability of this unshamable regime to be all the money it has been stealing from its people and squirrelling out of the country into hidden accounts, real estate, and shell companies, funnelling the rest of the funds into the machinery of state repression now responsible for killing and arresting protesters. So we decided to go after the regime’s massive corruption and illicit financial flows by creating an organisation called The Sentry, aimed at making it harder for them to loot the natural resources of the country to line their pockets and finance their repression….

Well, good for them. The virtue-signalling here has been coming not from the celebs, but from the Guardian. What a surprise.

Meanwhile, at MEMRI, Sudanese rapper Aziz adds his voice to the calls for the government of al-Bashir to go. Brave lad. It's a sign of the times.