FOUNDERS
Don Cheadle
George Clooney
Matt Damon
Brad Pitt
David Pressman
Drawing upon the voices of cultural leaders to protect and assist the vulnerable, marginalized, and displaced.
Not On Our Watch is a federally registered 501(c)3 charity.
How The World’s Newest Country Went Awry
Note: This report is published on enoughproject.org
War has been hell for South Sudan’s people, but it has been very lucrative for the country’s leaders and commercial collaborators, South Sudan’s war profiteers. South Sudan has been torn apart by three wars in the last 60 years. Two and a half to three million people have perished as a result of these wars. This legacy has finally caught up to the world’s newest country, as the United Nations declared a full-blown famine in February 2017, a rare declaration that the U.N. hadn’t made for any part of the world since 2011, and multiple U.N. officials have asserted that South Sudan stands on the brink of genocide.
South Sudan’s government-made famine
This op-ed originally appeared in the Washington Post, and was written by the co-founders of the Sentry, George Clooney and John Prendergast.
Official, U.N.-declared famines are a rare phenomenon. The last one worldwide was six years ago, in Somalia. Famines are declared officially when people have already begun to starve to death. It is the diplomatic equivalent of a seven-alarm fire. That is where the youngest country in the world, South Sudan, finds itself today, as 100,000 face immediate starvation and another 1 million are on its brink.
Note: This op-ed originally appeared in The Hill and was written by John Prendergast and Omer Ismail.
In an unexpected move at the end of last year, Sudan’s President Omar Bashir traveled to Russia and appealed to President Vladimir Putin for protection from the United States. Strangely, this occurred only a month after the United States prematurely moved towards normalizing relations with the very abnormal government of Sudan by removing comprehensive sanctions on the country. Bashir purchased fighter jets from Russia and discussed with Putin the creation of a Russian military base on the Red Sea.
