George Clooney under fire at the United Nations

By Andreas Sandre von Warburg

The visit to the UN Headquarters in New York by Hollywood star George Clooney, who recently joined the ranks of fellow actor Michael Douglas and Brazilian author Paulo Coelho as UN Messenger of Peace, is creating a lot of attention… Negative attention that is.

The star of the “Ocean 11” series, at the UN to attend a ceremony marking his designation as special peace envoy by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, took on the job of promoting the world body’s peacekeeping missions after waging his commitment with Not on Our Watch, a humanitarian group he co-founded to focus global attention on Darfur’s people. Clooney’s own group has raised more than $9.3 million for the region.

During the press conference, Clooney was under fire by UN correspondents for his stand on Kosovo. Last week, Serbian newspapers claimed he and fellow actors Sharon Stone, Richard Gere, and Sean Connery all stood in opposition to an independent Kosovo.

Asked by a UN reporter to clear his position, Clooney denied once again: “I’ve never said anything about Kosovo, ever. I’ve never made any comment about that.”

“I know enough about it to have my own opinion, but I would certainly not share it here because I have to sort of figure them out and hear both sides,” he continued. “It’s a story that got floated and went around,” I’ve never once made a comment about it. I am concerned, will always be, of what would happen if Kosovo does break away.”

However, according to a recent article by Croatia’s news outlet Javno, the potential cause of Clooney’s resistance towards the independent Kosovo is his long-term friendship with political activist Milo Radulovic, a Serbian immigrant who domesticated himself in California and whose experiences were used in the film “Good Night and Good Luck” that plays with anti-Communist paranoia in the United States. Radulovic was very concerned with the prospects of the independent Kosovo and touched on the subject frequently in talks with Clooney before dying of a heart attack last year.

Much ado about nothing? Probably. The new role of Clooney as a UN Messenger of Peace is to attract attention around the United Nations and the work of the Organization in Sudan and other hotspots. And his celebrity status is certainly helping!