Abby Ohlheiser: In the collective gasp that followed the shooting in Tucson on Saturday, the story of the ongoing voting on a referendum for southern independence in Sudan was all but lost. We’re still catching up at The Revealer secret headquarters ourselves. Consensus in the coverage seems to be that the southern third of Sudan, which is mostly Christian and Animist, will vote for secession from the northern part of the country, which has a Muslim majority.
Get Religion is all over the role religion, as opposed to oil and/or ethnicity, plays in the ongoing conflict in Sudan. And Reuters and The Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog have weighed in on what secession might do for non-Muslim communities in the northern capital of Khartoum as well as along the likely border between north and south Sudan (prognosis not good).
According to a quote in the LA Times, George Clooney has decided to try and help prevent genocide along the border by going paparazzi:
“You can go on Google Earth and Google my house,” said the actor. “I thought, if that’s the way it is and they’re gonna be able to Google my house, then people who are committing war crimes, specifically the government of Sudan, should be able to enjoy the same level of celebrity that I do. These people are public figures, and we’re gonna take their pictures.”
If that strategy isn’t to your liking, perhaps you’d like to read about how George Clooney and friends have just let the terrorists win.
And for the nostalgics amongst you, Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal thinks we really should just get some of that good old colonialism up in there:
The West professes to “care” about countries such as Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire and—at least for as long as George Clooney is in the area— south Sudan. But “care” at the level of simple emotion is little more than a cheap vanity. The colonialists of yore may often have been bigots, but they were also, just as often, doers. Their colonies were better places than the shipwrecked countries we have today.
Better places in what way, we must wonder.