Sudan

By Bruce W. Nelan

The flat, parched plains of Sudan seem to run on endlessly, right over the horizon. Outside the few towns, there are no roads, no telephones, no electricity. The country is a vast emptiness of almost 1 million sq. mi.; yet it is home to just 28.5 million people, and the only way to get from one place to another is to walk. If you are starving, it can take days or weeks to stagger to one of the dozen feeding centers run by international aid agencies. That is what thousands of stick-figured Sudanese are doing right now: trekking desperately in search of food, tottering, often falling into the dust to die, sometimes within sight of their goal. This time it is not only emaciated mothers with their hollow-cheeked children but skeletal men as well, not just in the war-ravaged south but also in the north. Across the pitiless expanse of Sudan, starvation threatens 2.6 million people, of whom 350,000 may be facing death.

Why is this happening? Why are we seeing these wrenching pictures again? Isn't the U.N. doing its job? Didn't President Clinton go to Africa last spring and promise to pay more attention? Well, it seems Sudan is what the aid professionals euphemistically call a "complex emergency." In their terminology, a simple emergency is one that is either man-made or the result of natural disasters. A complex emergency is a catastrophe caused by man and nature working together to destroy. That definition fits Sudan's crisis to doleful perfection.

Yet it is nothing new. For much of the past two decades, every three or four years, like clockwork, the country lapses into famine brought on not just by bad luck but also by the combined follies of nearly everyone involved. The 15-year-old civil war between the Islamic government in Khartoum and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south has stripped the country virtually to the bone. When the fighting is going badly for its side, the government tries to starve the rebels into submission by cutting off food aid. The rebel fighters routinely take food from civilians to sustain themselves or block supplies from reaching the territory of their factional rivals. And the aid community stands accused of sheer pusillanimity, docilely submitting to the strictures of the Sudanese government rather than pushing through the assistance the country urgently needs. Even the U.S. government, pledged to prevent such needlessly recurring famines, has "screwed up royally," admits a senior Clinton Administration official. "We are all to blame for this massive failure."

Now that the world is discovering the extent of the incipient tragedy, Washington, the U.N. and nongovernmental relief organizations are all pointing fingers at one another, insisting that someone else should have seen this coming and taken action. White House officials say they are furious at the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) for not sounding the alarm sooner. But hunger is a constant threat in Sudan, and the main aid supplier, Operation Lifeline Sudan, a consortium of U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations, has been in business since 1989, when 250,000 died. Sudan suffered a killer famine as recently as 1994. Everyone involved knew the country would need food aid this year; they just didn't seem either to know how much or to move fast enough.

As appalling pictures of the starving began stirring up humanitarian outrage, Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger met in Washington to discuss emergency action. The U.S., the biggest contributor of funds and food to Sudan, originally offered $23.7 million between now and next spring. Two weeks ago, the U.S. raised its donation to $75 million, and in his radio address last Saturday, Clinton promised to send more.

What the Sudanese call the "hunger gap"--the period between April and September when food from the previous harvest runs out while it is still too early for the next--is nothing new. The gap hits hard each time, but every three or four years, when nature serves up a prolonged drought, it widens into full-scale famine. The current dry spell has been devastating, destroying the past two harvests. Without the rains, the pasture lands and rivers that supply fish have dried up, leaving hungry farm families nothing to fall back on.

But the depth of each famine is an integral part of the civil war that has slaughtered an estimated 1.5 million people in the past 15 years. The warring parties use food as a weapon, caring little about starving people until the world periodically turns its cameras on the horror. This past winter, the usual man-made mischief was compounded by a three-way power struggle. A breakaway rebel faction that had joined the government side robbed and pillaged hungry villages for Khartoum, then switched its loyalty back to the SPLA. In January the SPLA launched a bloody antigovernment offensive in the south that prevented farmers from cultivating and cut off what little food aid was coming in, driving a flood of 100,000 refugees into the already starving 52,000-sq.-mi. southern region of Bahr el Ghazal. Now 700,000 people there have nothing to eat except what aid workers can bring in.

Losing ground on the battlefield, the Islamist government saw this as a chance to put pressure on the rebels, so Khartoum barred all relief flights--the only effective means of delivering food--into the neediest areas for all of February and March. Over the years, the U.N.'s Operation Lifeline has customarily submitted to the government's restrictions as the price of maintaining access, eroding Lifeline's mandate and independence. This spring its directors feared the regime would shut it down if it became too pushy. "As an institution," complains a State Department official, "it has been consumed with trying to survive." In Washington, though aid officials were frustrated by the flight ban, no one pushed to put public pressure on Khartoum.

Other institutions charged with monitoring the countries liable to famine failed to deliver strong, early warnings. Last September the U.S.A.I.D. put out a bulletin on its Famine Early Warning System predicting that Sudan's bad harvest would cause shortages and lead to intensified fighting over supplies, but the organization did not predict a full-scale famine. When the U.N.'s World Food Program, a major partner in Operation Lifeline, was preparing in December to ask donor countries for 30,000 tons of food for Sudan, its own estimates showed at least 35,000 tons would be needed. (Today the program says Sudan will need 15,000 tons a month.) But because of "donor fatigue" and the immense delivery problems, the program scaled back its request. Says an aid coordinator: "They defined the need according to their resources rather than the other way around."

By the time Operation Lifeline grew alarmed enough at the escalating shortages in mid-April to press Khartoum to reopen southern air strips and drop zones, it did not have enough chartered planes to make deliveries: it had just one C-130 Hercules, which can carry 16 tons of cargo, and two smaller Buffalos. At the end of April, the Sudanese government grudgingly gave clearance for three more chartered C-130s. Soon four big Ilyushin-76s (cargo capacity: 32 tons) are also to be allowed in. With this beefed-up air service, deliveries will soon reach 10,000 tons a month. That is better, but not close to the 15,000 tons required. "The only way to put an end to this," says Catherine Bertini, executive director of the World Food Program, "is to stop the war."

But there has been vicious warfare on and off since Sudan's independence in 1956. Africa's largest country is really two: an Islamic, Arabized north and a Christian, animist and African south. The government in Khartoum is headed by Lieut. General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, but the real power is Hassan al-Turabi, a radical scholar who leads the National Islamic Front and is intent on enforcing Muslim law on the land. On the battlefield, the shifting coalition led by John Garang's SPLA has been successful recently, opening a new front in the northeast. Officially the rebels are fighting for self-rule, but their private agenda has always included a slot for outright independence. These days Garang may hope to conquer the whole country, but so far, neither side has been able to win.

While the armies struggle, the people are trampled by wave after wave of marauders. Khartoum has been buying off rebel leaders from the south and turning them loose on their own people. Another scourge is the Popular Defense Force militia--Arab horsemen recruited as army auxiliaries who also raid southern villages, stealing cattle, shooting young men and kidnapping women and children.

Now that world attention is again focusing accusingly on Sudan, the government and the rebels have agreed to a short cease-fire to give food shipments free access. The pause does not guarantee either that enough food to end the famine will get through all the unruly rebel factions and bandits or that talks on a more permanent peace will get under way in earnest. The regime in Khartoum, weary of a war that is costing $1 million a day, and increasingly unpopular as it seeks to draft the nation's reluctant youth into the fruitless fight, is ready to talk about autonomy for the south; Garang, with visions of victory, refuses.

But peace is the commodity the Sudanese people need most. Their starvation is all the worse because it is so unnecessary. Southern Sudan offers some of the most productive land in Africa, and the people who live there are hardworking farmers and herdsmen, past masters at raising cattle, coping with scanty rainfall and husbanding seeds. If the battles would only end, they could make it on their own. Instead, tens of thousands of them are likely to die in this famine and the next one, which is sure to come.

--Reported by William Dowell/United Nations, Clive Mutiso/Khartoum and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by William Dowell/United Nations, Clive Mutiso/Khartoum and Douglas Waller/Washington