George Clooney gets arrested for Sudan

WASHINGTON — George Clooney has been arrested at Sudan’s embassy in Washington during a protest against the country’s blockade of humanitarian aid.

Clooney, his father Nick and other anti-Sudan activists including several members of the U.S. Congress ignored three police warnings to leave the grounds of the mission in Washington’s Embassy Row, leading officers to escort them in plastic handcuffs to a waiting police van.

The “Descendants” star, a longtime activist for human rights in Sudan, met Thursday with US President Barack Obama after paying a clandestine visit to South Kordofan, where aid groups say 250,000 people are at risk of imminent food shortages.

Clooney was protesting Sudan’s efforts to block humanitarian aid from reaching a volatile border region where its army is fighting rebels aligned with South Sudan. He had been widely expected to provoke police into arresting him.

“We need humanitarian aid to be allowed into the Sudan before it becomes the worst humanitarian crisis in the world — immediately,” Clooney said to cheering supporters shortly before his arrest.

“The second thing we are here to ask is a very simple thing — it’s for the government in Khartoum to stop randomly killing its own innocent men, women and children,” Clooney said.

“Stop raping them, and stop starving them. That’s all we ask,” he said.

Four members of the House of Representatives — Al Green, Jim McGovern, Jim Moran and John Olver — were also arrested at the protest, along with human rights activists and religious leaders. 


National Post
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/16/george-clooney-arrested-at-sudanese-embassy-protest-in-washington
/