I was going to begin this column with a 13-year-old Chadian boy crippled by a bullet in his left knee, but my hunch is that you might be more interested in hearing about another person on the river bank beside the boy: George Clooney.
Clooney flew in with me to the little town of Dogdore, along the border with Darfur, Sudan, to see how the region is faring six years after the Darfur genocide began. Clooney figured that since cameras follow him everywhere, he might as well redirect some of that spotlight to people who need it more.
It didn’t work perfectly: No paparazzi showed up. But, hey, it has kept you reading at least this far into yet another hand-wringing column about Darfur, hasn’t it?
So I’ll tell you what. You read my columns about Darfur from this trip, and I’ll give you the scoop on every one of Clooney’s wild romances and motorcycle accidents in this remote nook of Africa. You’ll read it here, way before The National Enquirer has it, but only if you wade through paragraphs of genocide.
The Darfur conflict has now lasted longer than World War II, but this year could be a turning point – provided that President Barack Obama shows leadership and that the world backs up the International Criminal Court’s expected arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Read it all
Nicholas D. Kristof on Darfur: Trailing George Clooney
I was going to begin this column with a 13-year-old Chadian boy crippled by a bullet in his left knee, but my hunch is that you might be more interested in hearing about another person on the river bank beside the boy: George Clooney.
Clooney flew in with me to the little town of Dogdore, along the border with Darfur, Sudan, to see how the region is faring six years after the Darfur genocide began. Clooney figured that since cameras follow him everywhere, he might as well redirect some of that spotlight to people who need it more.
It didn’t work perfectly: No paparazzi showed up. But, hey, it has kept you reading at least this far into yet another hand-wringing column about Darfur, hasn’t it?
So I’ll tell you what. You read my columns about Darfur from this trip, and I’ll give you the scoop on every one of Clooney’s wild romances and motorcycle accidents in this remote nook of Africa. You’ll read it here, way before The National Enquirer has it, but only if you wade through paragraphs of genocide.
The Darfur conflict has now lasted longer than World War II, but this year could be a turning point – provided that President Barack Obama shows leadership and that the world backs up the International Criminal Court’s expected arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Read it all