Bush, in Sudan, Hears Ethiopians’ Aid Appeal

Thousands of refugees from Ethiopia’s civil war, jamming the narrow paths of a Sudanese famine relief camp for a visit by Vice President George Bush, appealed Tuesday for American aid in feeding up to 3 million starving people still living in that nation’s embattled northern provinces.

The plea came in a letter given to Bush as he toured Wad Sheriffe, a sprawling maze of thatch huts near Kassala that houses 66,000 of the 600,000 Ethiopians who have fled to Sudan. Members of an Eritrean refugee council who wrote the letter asserted that food intended for the drought-ravaged north has been diverted by the Ethiopian government to feed its army, which is battling insurgents in Eritrea and Tigre provinces.

Bush, who called the refugees’ situation “a great human tragedy,” told the council he hopes there will be a role for the United States “in solving the ugly political problem you talk about.”

However, a senior American official accompanying Bush said later that the United States “continues to support, as we always have, the territorial integrity of Ethiopia. I think what he (Bush) was saying is that when people use famine as an instrument of war, that’s unacceptable.”

Told of Improvement

The refugees’ plight was vividly depicted at Wad Sheriffe, a barren, table-flat camp that hugs the Ethiopian border about 250 miles east of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. In stops within the camp at a Swiss Red Cross hospital, an American water storage facility and several feeding centers, Bush was repeatedly told that life at Wad Sheriffe has greatly improved. Still, about 15 persons die there daily.

At the Swiss hospital, administrator Jean-Marie Tromme said most children there could not walk when they arrived, but that “now we see the children playing.” He added, “There is enough food for the time being.” In January, he said, the entire camp was without food for days.

Using an interpreter, one woman at the Swiss hospital agitatedly told Bush why she and her tiny, emaciated baby fled Ethiopia. “There is no food,’ she said. “They are killing people and animals. No food, no security.”

Bushes Ladle Milk

In later stops at refugee feeding centers in Wad Sheriffe, Bush weighed once-starving babies to measure recent weight gains, and his wife Barbara ladled out doses of milk and high-protein food into dozens of colorful cups held by children. The Bushes were hailed at the centers with high-pitched, wavering yelps from camp residents, an eerie-sounding but common greeting of good will in the region.

Outside one center that feeds two meals daily to 1,200 children, Bush criticized the Ethiopian government for blocking a “reconciliation” that might allow the camp’s residents to return home. “The whole human equation in this camp,” he said, “ . . . cries out for politics to be set aside and for safe passage or safe delivery (of food) to take place.”

The Wad Sheriffe visit capped a crowded day in which the vice president also met with Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiri and viewed the unloading of food and medicine, donated by American relief groups, from a U.S. military transport plane. Most of the goods were provided by the relief organization Save the Children.

One of the two senior officials with Bush later said the vice president told Numeiri that the United States will pledge another 83,000 tons of high-protein food to Sudan, adding to the 750,000 tons already shipped or committed this fiscal year. All but 3,000 tons of the food will be reserved for Sudanese citizens, who face an increasing famine problem in the nation’s drought-stricken central region.

Bush’s schedule today includes a visit to a Sudanese drought relief camp at El Obeid, 250 miles west of Khartoum.