Paul Drinkwater/NBCMaybe the Hollywood Foreign Press wasn't too far off in giving a lifetime achievement honor to George Clooney.
The Oscar-winning actor, who admitted during his Cecil B. DeMille Award speech at the Golden Globes that his human-rights attorney wife Amal Clooney was the real achiever of the two, reminded us that he's not just a handsome face, joining forces on a New York Times op-ed decrying the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur—a cause that Clooney has been fighting to draw awareness to for years now, meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss the topic and speaking on Capitol Hill.
"In 2004, the United States declared Sudan's actions a genocide," Clooney wrote with John Prendergast, co-founder with Clooney of the Satellite Sentinel Project; and Akshaya Kumar, a policy analyst for the Enough Project. "After that spike in attention and concern, the world has largely forgotten about Darfur. Unfortunately, the government of Sudan has not."
The civil war-torn African nation split in 2011 into the northern Republic of the Sudan and South Sudan, neither of which is remotely stable.
Clooney and his co-authors cite, among the ongoing atrocities, a mass rape (as documented by Human Rights Watch) that took place in the village of Tabit, one of the so-called "model villages" set up with money from Qatar for displaced citizens to live.
"After collecting more than 130 witness and survivor testimonies over the phone, its researchers concluded that at least 221 women had been raped by soldiers of the Sudanese Army over a 36-hour period last October," the op-ed reads. "The peacekeepers' attempts to investigate this incident were obstructed by the government, which allowed them into the town briefly for interviews that were conducted in a climate of intimidation. "
Noting that the rapes by army officials or police have constituted tortue in the eyes of some courts, Clooney, Prendergaast and Kumar insist that, with United Nations Security Council intervention in the region waning, the time is now to take steps (which they detail at length) to curb the violence.
"The 'torture rapes' in Tabit are a reminder to the world that the same conditions that led to the United States' declaration of genocide in Darfur are still firmly in place, with devastating human consequences," the men write. "We must not forget the survivors, and we must impose deterrent costs on the orchestrators and their enablers."
Don't worry, George: Amal's lucky to have you, too.