IRC staff introduce George Clooney to the people of Jaac Village.
George Clooney says he and his father traveled to East Africa to hear first-hand accounts of Darfur’s violence and displacement and to give voice to the millions of innocent victims whose stories are not being heard by much of the world.
The Clooneys met up with International Rescue Committee aid workers in Sudan’s Bahr El Ghazal Province, where the IRC provides mobile medical services for communities struggling to recover from more than 20 years of civil war between the north and the south. With the IRC, they traveled to an area some 60 kilometers south of Darfur, where an estimated 500 people who fled the violence in Darfur have sought refuge.
The displaced families, from mostly Arabic tribes, live in makeshift shelters in a village that can hardly feed its own and where water is extremely scarce. Still, the uprooted say they are happy to be there. In interviews with the Clooneys, they describe attacks on their Darfur villages by Sudanese rebels and other marauding groups, the killing of family members, the looting of their farms and separation from children in the chaos of flight.
In spite of increasing instability in neighboring Chad, days later the Clooneys traveled to the country’s eastern region, where more than 200,000 refugees from Darfur have settled over the past two and half years.
At an IRC water filtration facility, George Clooney surveys the IRC-managed Oure Cassoni Camp near the northeastern Chadian village of Bahai?now home to nearly 30,000 Darfur refugees.
At the Oure Cassoni refugee camp, the Clooneys met with groups of refugee women who spoke of brutal raids on their villages in North Darfur by “janjaweed” militia.
The refugee camp in northeastern Chad is filled with children whose lives were turned upside down by the conflict.
The visitors and their cameras provide fascinated children a welcome respite from the monotony of life in a refugee camp.
The Darfur refugees say they long for the day when stability will be restored in Darfur?enabling them to return home, revive their farms and rebuild their homes. They question why so little is being done to end the violence and protect the innocent in Darfur.
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