As reported last week, American actor George Clooney and a group he formed is joining forces with Google, a U.N. agency and anti-genocide organizations to launch a satellite surveillance of the border between north and south Sudan to try to prevent a new civil war during the south’s scheduled elections on January 11, 2011..
The Satellite Sentinel Project — a joint experiment by the U.N.’s Operational Satellite Applications Program, Harvard University, the Enough Project and Clooney’s posse of Hollywood funders — will hire private satellites to monitor troop movements starting with the oil-rich region of Abyei. Sentinel is launching with $750,000 in seed money from Not On Our Watch, the human rights organization Clooney founded along with Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, David Pressman and Jerry Weintraub.
The satellite data will point out movements of troops, civilians and other signs of impending conflict. Images collected by the satellite will be scrutinized and made public at www.satsentinel.org within 24 hours of an event to remind the leaders of northern and southern Sudan that they are being watched.
I am excited that the situation in Sudan is receiving such celebrity attention. The world was just too quiet on Dafur, almost caught sleeping on Rwanda, and didn’t care much about Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Mr. Clooney has continually warned that genocide in Sudan should not happen on our watch.
