South Sudan is nearly a nation, with a little celebrity help

JUBA, Sudan — On the desk in his office in Juba, the capital of what will soon be the world's newest country, R. Barrie Walkley, the U.S. consul general, has a telling picture. It is of him and George Clooney shaking hands in a crowd during the independence referendum here in southern Sudan in January.

The photograph offers a unique window into what is happening now. American celebrities and religious groups teamed with policymakers and helped a forlorn, underdog region finally achieve what very few separatist movements achieve: independence. On Saturday, after decades of guerrilla struggles and intense international pressure, the Republic of South Sudan will officially split off from the north and become Africa's 54th country.

"Once you got someone like George Clooney, for example ..." Walkley trails off with a smile. "George packs power."

On Friday, last-minute preparations were being made for the deluge of high-powered guests expected Saturday, from Colin L. Powell to President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Work crews were putting fences up and applying final coats of paint. Throngs of young people marched down the road in impromptu parades. Passing motorists honked gleefully and pumped their fists in the air, in solidarity.

"In the coming hours," said Barnaba Marial Benjamin, South Sudan's information minister, "we will bear witness to the passage of history and the transformation of the map of Africa."

John Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University, said one reason Sudan has attracted so much attention is that its internal conflicts were easily reduced by outsiders to absolutes of oppressed Africans, many of them Christians, getting crushed by Arabs.

There was a relationship between two seminal events in Sudan: the explosion of violence in the Darfur region and the end of the decades-long war in the south. Many Sudan analysts have said that Darfur — and all the attention it was getting — was the added pressure that finally pushed the Sudanese government, facing an international public relations disaster, to sign the treaty in 2005 that gave the southerners just about all they wanted.

In January, Sudan's divorce became a fait accompli when southerners voted in a referendum, by 98.8 percent, to secede. In the months leading to the vote, celebrities like Clooney urged the Obama administration to stay focused on Sudan.