George Clooney's satellite watch: Calm before the storm? (Feature)

By Gisela Ostwald Jan 6, 2011, 3:51 GMT

New York/Geneva - Big Brother will be watching when close to 4 million southern Sudanese voters go to the polls Sunday: a satellite monitoring system sponsored by George Clooney will seek to prevent, or at least document, any potential atrocities.

So far, satellite pictures of oil-rich southern Sudan - whose independence is at stake in Sunday's referendum - show calm.

However, many fear that the election may renew a decades-old bloody conflict between the Arab north and the black African south of Sudan, the largest country in Africa.

And Clooney, a human-rights activist as well as a Hollywood icon, wants to make sure the world is watching.

The first satellite images of the so-called Satellite Sentinel Project were posted Thursday on the Internet.

The initiative is paid for by the organization Not On Our Watch, which was founded by Clooney and other Hollywood stars including Don Cheadle, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt to focus global attention and resources toward putting an end to mass atrocities around the world.

Also partnering in the initiative are the Enough Project, an anti- genocide group; UNOSAT (the United Nations UNITAR Operational Satellite Applications Programme); the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; Google; and Internet strategy and development firm Trellon LLC.

The project uses pictures from commercial satellites overflying the border region between northern and southern Sudan at an altitude of 500 kilometres. The goal is to capture possible threats to civilians, observe the movements of displaced people, detect bombed and razed villages or note other evidence of pending mass violence.

Satellite pictures of threatening developments would be available to the public 24 hours later, on the UNOSAT website, and shortly after that also on the Satellite Sentinel Project website. Harvard experts have agreed to assess the situation and to issue reports on what they see.

It only takes the installation of the programme Google Earth to see the photos and zoom in on cars, planes and moving crowds, Lars Bromley of UNOSAT-UNITAR in Geneva told the German Press Agency dpa.

'We are the anti-genocide paparazzi,' Clooney recently told the news magazine Time in an interview. 'We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum.'

Even if these aerial spies cannot prevent violence in southern Sudan, they will at least expose perpetrators of crimes and make it possible to bring them to justice.

'This is probably the first time UNOSAT is getting involved in a region before trouble starts,' Bromley told dpa.

For about 10 years, the United Nations has been watching crisis regions, but they have never been proactive in their approach. Only after a natural disaster or after violence breaks out have they monitored Sri Lanka, Kurdistan and the conflict between Russia and Georgia, for example, Bromley notes.

Satellite photographs are expensive. Pictures can cost up to 70,000 dollars, says Bromley. Clooney has so far collected 750,000 dollars for the Sudan project through Not On Our Watch.

'The money will last quite a while. We also get donations from the satellite imaging companies,' Bromley says.

Clooney has been personally involved in efforts to help Sudan for years. Until now, however, he had focused on mitigating the suffering of people in conflict-ridden Darfur.

The upcoming referendum led him to turn his attention to resource- rich southern Sudan. The referendum, part of the 2005 peace agreement to end the longest civil war in Africa, is being overshadowed by the risk of attacks from the north and the threat of ethnic violence between rival groups in the south.

As to the referendum's outcome, there are few doubts. According to an opinion poll published in the Sudan Tribune, 97 per cent of registered voters will favour having their own state.

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