Hollywood celebrities played key role in South Sudan's independence crusade

Washington, July 9 (ANI): Hollywood celebrities and US churches played a key role in bringing independence to South Sudan.

American celebrities and religious groups teamed with policymakers and helped the region finally achieve independence, the BBC reports.

The celebrities include actors Don Cheadle and George Clooney, known to some in the US as 'Mr Sudan'.

Clooney, convinced by activist friends to use his star power to draw attention to the crisis in Sudan, led a rally in Washington and delivered a speech on Sudan at the United Nations in 2006.

On the other side, were evangelical Christians determined to stop what they claimed was the persecution and killing of Christians by Muslims from northern Sudan.

Evangelical churches began building hospitals, schools and churches in the mostly animist and Christian south in the 1990s.

A member of the Bush administration, the former ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell, said he believes that lobbying and campaigning by evangelicals and Hollywood celebrities made a lot of difference.

"South Sudan captured the public's imagination more than has happened elsewhere in Africa because Christians in Sudan used their grapevine to let Christians in America know that Muslims were persecuting them," Campbell said.

"Celebrities made all of this known, in their way, to ordinary people and made it part of the conversation to people who would otherwise not pay much attention to what was happening overseas," he added.(ANI)

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