Can George Clooney Stop a War in Sudan?

George Clooney and Ann Curry’s graphic hour-long documentary Winds of War aired last Friday night Dateline NBC—the kick off to a week-long media blitz to sound the alarm about the brewing potential for war to break out again in Southern Sudan when the vote for independence takes place on January 9

Last month after his trip to Sudan, Clooney and Sudanese activist John Prendergast met with President Obama . Obama immediately dispatched John Kerry to Sudan to broker a peace agreement between North and South. So what happened?

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Kerry has been strangely absent from the media circus around Sudan this week. The Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2010/10/25/sudan_gives_kerry_proposal_that_could_bring_peaceful_separation/reported that Kerry was not optimistic about the fate of an oil-producing border area known as Abyei.

There is a good possibility that the Sudanese government will not allow the oil-rich region in the South to split off, and many are talking about the possibility for new genocide.

After Clooney and Curry spoke to grandmothers who had been brutalized and women and men who witnessed their families killed, yet held onto hope for independence and even peace, he told Curry: "We were late to Rwanda. We were late to Congo. We were late to Darfur. But this time we have the opportunity to act to make sure that genocide does not occur again. If you knew a tsunami, or Katrina or a Haiti earthquake was coming, what would you do?"

You can read more from Clooney and Prendergast about their trip here.