George's response in the Guardian to Nesrene Malik article

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Excellent! Great article, and a mammoth effort in the region that we should all be proud of. Wow!

I agree, excellent!!!

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Sudan

[size=31]Clooney and Prendergast: We're not silent on Sudan – we're going after the regime's loot[/size]

We’ve learned that working behind the scenes achieves more than naming and shaming 

George Clooney and John Prendergast
Thu 24 Jan 2019 06.45 ESTLast modified on Thu 24 Jan 2019 06.49 EST

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 Actor George Clooney visits the Zamzam refugee camp in North Darfur, Sudan, in January 2008. Photograph: Sherren Zorba/AP/PA Photos
[size=89]“Where are George Clooney and co now that Sudan needs them?” asked an Opinion article in the Guardian this week. The oped assumed that a lack of public statements by us and others with a long association with Darfur, Sudan more broadly, and South Sudan meant that we were doing nothing in response to the Sudanese regime’s brutal crackdown of escalating protests throughout the country.
This is indeed a critical moment in Sudan’s fraught history. The people of Sudan are rightly leading demands for change, and we believe our role is to support the cause of human rights for Sudanese people by using strategic and tactical advocacy in Europe, the US, and Africa focused on key points of leverage. As the demonstrations have unfolded this past month, our entire team has continuously engaged officials in governments around the world to take measures to hold the Bashir regime accountable. Much of this advocacy is not done in public.

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Omar al-Bashir launches media crackdown as Sudan protests continue

 
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To support Sudanese efforts for change we have been working assiduously behind the scenes to suspend the US government’s process for removing president Omar al-Bashir’s regime from its state sponsors of terrorism list. Such a move would lift remaining sanctions and make the Sudanese government eligible for massive debt relief; one of the few points of leverage the international community has over the Khartoum regime.
We have been engaging the Trump administration and the US Congress to suspend the process of normalising relations with Bashir’s regime, whose human rights abuses go far beyond killing protesters. And we have dispatched staff to to engage governments in Europe and to the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa.
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.
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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.

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 ‘The people of Sudan are rightly leading demands for change.’ Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images
Our financial forensic investigative team is gathering evidence and we hope to have our first reports on Sudan in the coming year, just as we have already done in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic. The Sentry has also undertaken an assessment of Sudan’s anti-money laundering framework, and our report coming in the near future will show that the system is barely sufficient to meet international standards on paper, and far more concerning in practice. Bashir’s theft has taken longer to crack because his regime has been more sophisticated in obscuring its illicit money trails, including through manipulating and abusing their own flawed systems.

It is our belief that exposing the Bashir regime’s massive theft of resources from its people, and the complicity of the international financial system in this effort, constitutes the most critical way in which we can support Sudanese activists on the ground as they lead the campaign for justice and human rights. Much of our work in this regard is not public. We provide evidence directly to global banks to help them guard against money laundering through the international financial system, and we provide dossiers to governments, including to the US Treasury recently to support sanctions under the new Global Magnitsky authorities.
This work has gone hand-in-hand with our ongoing efforts in South Sudan. We’ve worked to expose the vast corruption in the Juba regime, and to successfully advocate for network sanctions and anti-money laundering measures imposed against key regime officials and financiers. The networks of looting are transnational, so many of the vultures feeding on South Sudan are also doing the same to Sudan. There is much money to be made in war, and the deliberate absence of the rule of law has supported the efforts of the thieves of state in Khartoum and Juba.
We’ve also supported the restoration of coffee farming in areas of South Sudan to help create incomes for the hard-working people there. Unfortunately, the conflict has overwhelmed these efforts, but we will continue to look for opportunities.

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'Change in people's hearts': anti-Bashir protests put Sudan at a crossroads

 
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We certainly support the work of journalists to ask questions about the activities of those working to address the world’s problems. But the Guardian and other publications with a history of important investigative journalism should be asking questions of the UK and other European governments, which continue to pursue favourable trade and investment opportunities with Sudan, and which are providing funds to the Sudan regime to contain migration, not fully understanding that those funds are going to the most violent paramilitary forces associated with the regime, ironically causing further out-migration from Sudan to Europe.
And journalists should be asking the US government how it can consider normalising relations with a government that is killing protesters, looting the country’s natural resources, failing to combat money laundering through its own system, maintaining ties with extremists inside and outside Sudan, and undermining basic religious freedoms.
This is a catalytic moment for the people of Sudan. We and our team – which includes Sudanese experts – are working in every way we can to support the aspirations of the people of Sudan for a peaceful transition from three decades of violent, kleptocratic dictatorship.


• Actor George Clooney and activist John Prendergast are co-founders of The Sentry.[/size]

So
The best defence is ...
Counterattack

I fear the most things G does are
Hidden

Exposing the truth is always the best defense.

ladybugcngc wrote:Exposing the truth is always the best defense.

Right


Where is the truth?

it's me wrote:

ladybugcngc wrote:Exposing the truth is always the best defense.

Right


Where is the truth?

The people of Sudan are rightly leading demands for change, and we believe our role is to support the cause of human rights for Sudanese people by using strategic and tactical advocacy in Europe, the US, and Africa focused on key points of leverage.


Truth is abstract to an absolute point.

Truth is abstract to an absolute point.



I like
When you talk in such
More ...precise way

This is a better point to talk around

Great op ed by George and John.  I’m glad they spoke out in response to the Sudanese reporter.  They’re doing good work.  I just don’t see headway being made if they can’t convince important players like the E.U. and the U.S. to get tougher on Bashir and his government.

..........yep. I figure that's why following the corruption would make sense.

When you've got China building most of the world's new road systems and exchanging Sudan's oil for military equipment for Bashir, and Turkey building ports in the Red Sea area for Sudan land grab and influence seem to be the agenda

Great, great comments for the Guardian piece by the way - and the author trying to defend herself too!

It doesn't surprise me that they're working so hard behind the scenes. It's actually what I thought they were doing. What does surprise me a bit is that they wrote such an extensive, revealing rebuttal to the Guardian article. Either it hit a nerve or they feel that now is the right time to bring this information to the public.

 I wonder who is in contact with the administration and who they're speaking to. I imagine it's a tough sell to someone like drumpf, who would love nothing better than to be exactly the kind of "leader" Bashir is.

Lizzy I was surprised too that George and John responded so quickly.  But it was a good move and important to at least share with the public their ongoing 
efforts to bring to light the corruption in Sudan.

The State Department is so depleted of personnel I wonder if there is anyone who is capable to act as a liaison on the Sudanese issue?  

I got an email from Not On Our Watch today.  I never get emails from NOW.  It was pretty much covering the same story as the guys published in The Guardian.  George may have felt that it was important to update his website since the Sudanese reporter made the point that NOW had not addressed the current situation in Sudan.  NOW’s address used to be NYC but the email I got today shows a DC address.  Maybe they moved ....

Snap, Donnamarie. I got a letter from George and John too from Enough Project in Washington. Have a feeling they've combined offices.

Smart email following up from the opportunity in The Guardian