Actor George Clooney, Martin Luther King III, several members of Congress, and other activists were arrested on Friday morning outside the Sudan Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue by the U.S. Secret Service, and taken away in plastic handcuffs. The group of activists was protesting the Sudanese hunger crisis, accusing President Omar al-Bashir of blocking food and humanitarian assistance from reaching hundreds of thousands of Sudanese.
The event had been nothing less than orchestrated, due to an announcement on Thursday describing plans for the nonviolent protest by Representative Jim Moran, D-Va., who was also arrested during the demonstration. At 10 a.m. on Friday morning, a group of roughly 100 protestors marched from nearby Sheridan Circle and positioned themselves next to the Embassy’s front lawn, followed by Clooney and his colleagues. On the Embassy’s steps, the actor and his fellow activists rotated to deliver brief remarks condemning al-Bashir. Clooney said, “I have just returned from the Nuba Mountains. I saw first hand what the effect is of a government in Khartoum that is using starvation as a weapon of war. This government used that tactic in its war with the South and two and a quarter million people died. If we don’t stand united as an international community, there will be thousands and thousands more fresh in those graves.”
