“Where are George Clooney and co now that Sudan needs them?” asked an Opinion article in the Guardian this week. The oped assumed that a lack of public statements by us and others with a long association with Darfur, Sudan more broadly, and South Sudan meant that we were doing nothing in response to the Sudanese regime’s brutal crackdown of escalating protests throughout the country.

This is indeed a critical moment in Sudan’s fraught history. The people of Sudan are rightly leading demands for change, and we believe our role is to support the cause of human rights for Sudanese people by using strategic and tactical advocacy in Europe, the US, and Africa focused on key points of leverage. As the demonstrations have unfolded this past month, our entire team has continuously engaged officials in governments around the world to take measures to hold the Bashir regime accountable. Much of this advocacy is not done in public.

Omar al-Bashir launches media crackdown as Sudan protests continue Read more

To support Sudanese efforts for change we have been working assiduously behind the scenes to suspend the US government’s process for removing President Omar al-Bashir’s regime from its state sponsors of terrorism list. Such a move would lift remaining sanctions and make the Sudanese government eligible for massive debt relief; one of the few points of leverage the international community has over the Khartoum regime.

We have been engaging the Trump administration and the US Congress to suspend the process of normalising relations with Bashir’s regime, whose human rights abuses go far beyond killing protesters. And we have dispatched staff to engage governments in Europe and to the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa.

Over more than a dozen years, we’ve invested millions of dollars into efforts to address Sudan’s – and South Sudan’s – crises. We launched the Satellite Sentinel Project to monitor the regime’s mass atrocities using satellite technology and teams of imagery analysts. We were able to uncover evidence of mass graves, Chinese-made rockets, hidden troop movements in violations of ceasefires, and many other destabilising actions of the Sudan regime.

Timeline South Sudan timeline Show Hide 1956 Independence Sudan – including the area that will later become South Sudan - attains independence after being under Anglo-Egyptian rule since 1899. 1962 First civil war In a pattern that will later re-establish itself, civil war breaks out in 1962 with a rebellion led by southern separatists, leading to limited autonomy being granted by Khartoum following a peace agreement signed in Addis Ababa in 1972. 1983 Second civil war War between Khartoum and the south breaks out again when ​President Jaafar Numeiri abolishes southern autonomy, leading to almost two decades of conflict. 2005 Peace and autonomy for the south The Comprehensive Peace Agreement is signed between ​John Garang​’s southern Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement and Khartoum which sees a new constitution and autonomy in the south whose administration is dominated by Garang’s former guerilla colleagues, foremost among them Salva Kiir. 2011 South Sudan formed After an uneasy period punctuated by outbreaks of violence, political leaders in the north and south agree to an independence referendum which sees the birth of the state of South Sudan 2013 War in the south ​Peace is short lived, however, with new conflict breaking out in 2013 when president Salva Kiir​ dismisses his cabinet and vice-president Riek Machar in a power struggle within the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, leading to conflict with Uganda which supports Kiir’s government forces. 2016 crisis An attempted mediation for which Machar returns to Juba breaks down amid more fighting, including accusations from the UN against Kiir of ethnic cleansing. Famine is declared a year later. Despite peace talks the conflict and atrocities continue, creating the continent’s largest refugee crisis.

But over time, we realised that naming and shaming the regime and exposing its complicity in mass atrocities were not having sufficient impact on the policies of governments in Europe, America and Africa, so we decided on a new approach.

We assessed the most significant point of vulnerability of this unshamable regime to be all the money it has been stealing from its people and squirrelling out of the country into hidden accounts, real estate and shell companies, funnelling the rest of the funds into the machinery of state repression now responsible for killing and arresting protesters. So we decided to go after the regime’s massive corruption and illicit financial flows by creating an organisation called The Sentry, aimed at making it harder for them to loot the natural resources of the country to line their pockets and finance their repression.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The people of Sudan are rightly leading demands for change.’ Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

Our financial forensic investigative team is gathering evidence and we hope to have our first reports on Sudan in the coming year, just as we have already done in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. The Sentry has also undertaken an assessment of Sudan’s anti-money laundering framework, and our report coming in the near future will show that the system is barely sufficient to meet international standards on paper, and far more concerning in practice. Bashir’s theft has taken longer to crack because his regime has been more sophisticated in obscuring its illicit money trails, including through manipulating and abusing their own flawed systems.

It is our belief that exposing the Bashir regime’s massive theft of resources from its people, and the complicity of the international financial system in this effort, constitutes the most critical way in which we can support Sudanese activists on the ground as they lead the campaign for justice and human rights. Much of our work in this regard is not public. We provide evidence directly to global banks to help them guard against money laundering through the international financial system, and we provide dossiers to governments, including to the US Treasury recently to support sanctions under the new Global Magnitsky authorities.

This work has gone hand-in-hand with our ongoing efforts in South Sudan. We’ve worked to expose the vast corruption in the Juba regime, and to successfully advocate for network sanctions and anti-money laundering measures imposed against key regime officials and financiers. The networks of looting are transnational, so many of the vultures feeding on South Sudan are also doing the same to Sudan. There is much money to be made in war, and the deliberate absence of the rule of law has supported the efforts of the thieves of state in Khartoum and Juba.

We’ve also supported the restoration of coffee farming in areas of South Sudan to help create incomes for the hard-working people there. Unfortunately, the conflict has overwhelmed these efforts, but we will continue to look for opportunities.

'Change in people's hearts': anti-Bashir protests put Sudan at a crossroads Read more

We certainly support the work of journalists to ask questions about the activities of those working to address the world’s problems. But the Guardian and other publications with a history of important investigative journalism should be asking questions of the UK and other European governments, which continue to pursue favourable trade and investment opportunities with Sudan, and which are providing funds to the Sudan regime to contain migration, not fully understanding that those funds are going to the most violent paramilitary forces associated with the regime, ironically causing further out-migration from Sudan to Europe.

And journalists should be asking the US government how it can consider normalising relations with a government that is killing protesters, looting the country’s natural resources, failing to combat money laundering through its own system, maintaining ties with extremists inside and outside Sudan, and undermining basic religious freedoms.

This is a catalytic moment for the people of Sudan. We and our team – which includes Sudanese experts – are working in every way we can to support the aspirations of the people of Sudan for a peaceful transition from three decades of violent, kleptocratic dictatorship.



• Actor George Clooney and activist John Prendergast are co-founders of The Sentry.







