Seed of South Sudan (26 page)

Currently, there is another NBA player from South Sudan, Luol Deng, and he learned basketball from Manute. He is also from the Dinka tribe; so he is one of my tribe. He plays for the Chicago Bulls, and he is active in charities to bring education and sports to refugees in camps. We in South Sudan are proud that he is reaching back to those in the camps; he knows how hard it is to be a refugee and seek asylum in another part of the world.

During the 2012 London Olympics, the world learned of a man who ran without his country's sponsorship, because he refused to acknowledge the country whose flag he could have run under. That country was Sudan, from which we became independent in 2011. South Sudan was his country, but it did not have the resources to create an Olympic committee, so it could not sponsor him. So he ran under the flag of the Olympics. His name is Guor Marial, and I got a chance to meet him—I actually arranged for him to speak at a fundraiser, making contacts so that he could come to Atlanta in 2012.

As deputy chair of the Rumbek Sudanese Community (Stephen Chol Bayok, the chair, was working in Oklahoma at the time), I was asked to arrange for him to come to Atlanta by those who were helping another Lost Boy, King Deng, or Makur Abior, to publicize his book,
The Original Lost Boy
. The event was for the King Deng Foundation, which assists street children in Lakes State and plans to start a school for them. Guor was from another Dinka tribe, the Agok Dinka from the Unity State, near the northern border with Sudan. As it happened, I knew someone who knew him, and we were able to arrange Guor's visit. He came from Arizona where he was training for the race. His schedule was extremely tight, but because of his commitment to help his people, he agreed to come and speak and help raise funds for these children to be educated.

I really respect people who take a stand and refuse based on memories of the war to embrace the old country too quickly. One day, things may be different, but for now it seems right to maintain a separate identity. That is what so many, many people died for.

Another person who has raised the visibility of the South Sudanese people is Alek Wek, a supermodel who also was a refugee, who after many years made her way to London and eventually hit it big in the media. She has also championed the cause of refugees in South Sudan.

Alek Wek has represented many fabled houses of fashion such as Christian Dior and Diane Von Furstenberg, and has published a memoir of her life as a refugee who fled southern Sudan after the civil war broke out and destroyed their village. She was sent to Khartoum and her family followed after. Her father, in the long walk from South Sudan, developed a hip fracture, and died of complications from surgery after he made it to Khartoum. Alek and some of her family of nine siblings fled to London, and the others were eventually given refuge in Australia and Canada.
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In London Alek worked outside school hours and sent money to her mother back in Sudan, finished school, and enrolled in fashion technology and business at London College of Fashion, a top school.
HELLO!
Online states that she became “one of the hottest new faces on the scene,” and pretty soon the top design houses were after her to wear their fashions on all the runways. “Her distinctive looks, so different from the usual catwalk face, caused a stir in the world of fashion and garnered a raft of awards, including ‘Best New Model' at the Venus de la Mode Fashion Awards, 1997 MTV model of the year and ‘Model of the Decade' from
i-D
.
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Alek is very active in advocating for the plight of the refugees, and is in fact a member of the U.S. Committee for Refugees Advisory Council, where she tries to bring attention to the plight of the humanitarian disaster in Sudan and other places.
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Some well-known celebrities from the United States and other countries have come forth in support of South Sudan since the area's plight became more widely known. In turn, Hollywood has responded by recognizing the artistic gifts these men and women have brought to the United States and the Western world. In 2003, Bruce Willis' movie
Tears of the Sun
, featured some of the Lost Boys, the refugees from southern Sudan, portraying the west Africans in a story about rescuing a doctor who won't go until her 70 refugees go with her. Other Lost Boys have become known as actors, including Alphonsian Deng, who goes by Alepho Deng, and Benjamin Ajak. Both of them were in
Master and Commander: On the Far Side of the World
with Russell Crowe, where they learned how to sail a tall ship. Alepho has had other roles as well.
¹⁴

Alepho's brother, Benson Deng, and their cousin, Benjamin Ajak, together with Judy Bernstein, wrote a book,
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky
, a very popular story of the journey each of them made across Sudan, some of them to Ethiopia, and then all eventually to Kenya. The story is told as each of them experienced his journey. All three ended up in Kakuma Refugee Camp, and after a number of years they were selected for the resettlement program and boarded a plane destined for points north, and to the United States and San Diego.
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Two others who have brought their celebrity to the causes of the South Sudanese are Ger Duany, a former child soldier in the Sudanese civil war and now noted actor and model, and Emmanuel Jal, former child soldier and now actor, hip-hop star, and celebrated activist who brings a message of peace through his music. Ger was forcefully recruited into the war as a seven-year-old and escaped at the age of 14, making his way to camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. He got a role in a film,
I Heart Huckabees
, when the director sought a real refugee to play the role of one; he has subsequently developed more roles in feature films, enjoyed a career as a model, and starred in a documentary about the South Sudan independence election in 2011,
Ger: To Be Separate
. Jal has acted in movies, but is best known for his appearances and music recordings. Both Ger and Jal will be in a feature film soon to be released, a fictional story that draws on Lost Boys' experiences.
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Actor and activist George Clooney has had the highest profile among those non–South Sudanese advocating for the country's needs. He was pictured on the cover of Newsweek in February 2011, just after the independence election in South Sudan and areas of the South Sudanese diaspora. The article highlighted the unique role that celebrity activists such as Clooney, Bono, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie play in Africa and other countries. Their goal is to raise awareness of world problems that might otherwise receive little or no attention in the press.
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“Clooney had traveled to the oil-rich contested region of Abyei on the eve of South Sudan's historic referendum,” John Avlon wrote in the
Newsweek
article after he accompanied Clooney. “When the polls closed seven days later, Africa's largest nation would be divided into two separate countries by electoral mandate.” After a war that took 2 million lives, it seemed incredible that such a peaceful election took place. Most of the credit belonged to the resolve of the southern Sudanese civilians and military who had fought the war. But in assuring the rest of the world would be watching in a very public way, “Clooney played a pivotal role.”
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Clooney was not known in this part of Africa for his movies—there are few movie houses—but for his visits to South Sudan, many with the cofounder of the Enough Project, John Prendergast. “Amid the factions, Clooney is seen as a man unconstrained by bureaucracy, with access to power and the ability to amplify a village's voice onto the world stage,” the
Newsweek
article said.
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The teaming with the Enough Project enabled Clooney to link with an ongoing organization dedicated to ending genocide across the world. The Project brings attention to areas of mass human suffering, the sites of the world's worst atrocities.
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The son of a journalist (his father Nick Clooney, 78, George, and a couple of congressmen were jailed briefly after a demonstration at the Sudanese embassy in Washington in 2012
),
Clooney has focused attention on this particular country with an awareness of how the media that follow him so relentlessly can be turned to help the cause of observing and action on behalf of countries such as South Sudan.
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“Celebrity can help focus news media where they have abdicated their responsibility,” he told Avlon. While he can't change the media, he said he can use it to help influence politicians to do something concrete. The paparazzi? “If they're going to follow me anyway, let them follow me here (to South Sudan
).
” And they have. If not the paparazzi, then the media in general pay attention to Clooney's statements.
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“He has briefed the Senate Foreign Relations committee and the UN Security Council,” the article states. He and Barack Obama “first worked together on Darfur. After their first Oval Office meeting, Obama appointed a special envoy to Sudan. The second meeting … resulted in the deployment of [then] Sen. John Kerry to Khartoum.”
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In the fall of October 2010, just before the January 9 referendum on independence, there was question among diplomats and those in South Sudan whether the election might even happen. (The 21-year war just ended had followed another such long war, the First Sudan Civil War.) Clooney's impact cannot be overstated, as Salva Kiir, who took the provisional government's leadership after John Garang died in the air crash, had effectively kept the South Sudan coalition together. The Obama administration and the UN focused their attention on the issues at that time. “And China—Sudan's largest oil investor—changed the equation by belatedly announcing it would support the referendum.
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“Still, after Clooney launched a media blitz to mark 100 days to the referendum, English-language newspaper, magazine, and website mentions of the Sudan referendum spiked from six to 165 in one month. Between October and January, the referendum was mentioned in 96 stories across the networks and cable news—with Clooney used as a hook one third of the time. In that same period, 95,000 people sent emails to the White House demanding action on South Sudan. Valentino Achak Deng, the former ‘lost boy' known to Americans as the subject of a bestselling ‘fictionalized memoir' by Dave Eggers,
What Is the What
, says simply: ‘The referendum would not have taken place without his involvement. Never. He saved millions of lives. I don't think he knows this.'”
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Clooney has joined his emphasis on media with his concern for South Sudan by beginning the Satellite Sentinel Program. This program, which is carried out with Prendergrast's organization, the Enough Project, provides the services of satellite surveillance to pinpoint areas of conflict between Sudan and South Sudan and between Sudan and Darfur. Once documenting areas where there are military attacks, he raises concerns in the media to focus attention on the issue.
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The attacks of the Sudanese government's Sudan Army Forces (SAF) in Darfur and adjacent areas have become a focus. Conflicts have centered on the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA
),
a rebel group in Darfur created in the style of the SPLA. The SLA has joined with the Justice and Equality Movement and formed the Sudanese Revolutionary Front (SRF) in its efforts to end the Bashir regime and form a democratic, secular government, in opposition to the Islamist-focused government that has been in power for so many decades.
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Clooney's Satellite Sentinel Program found that both Khartoum's Sudan government and the SRF were occupying areas of Kordofan state, an area that was supposed to be demilitarized. The satellites further showed craters in the market and adjoining neighborhoods near Abu Korshula in Southern Kordofan state, a sign that Sudanese government aircraft had bombed the area in an effort to dislodge the rebels. The Sentinel Project called for all forces, government and rebel, to withdraw and observe peace.
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