Sudan Rebels Reject Food Convoy Plan, Arousing Fear of New Famine

A proposal by the United Nations to sponsor a convoy of food and relief supplies to towns in southern Sudan cut off by an escalating civil war has been rejected by rebel leaders. The development is intensifying fears that hundreds of thousands of civilians could face severe food shortages in the coming weeks.

The U.N. emergency operations chief in Sudan, Winston R. Prattley, who failed in his attempt to negotiate safe passage for a U.N. convoy through rebel territory, said that 900,000 people could be affected by the food shortages.

Areas in the embattled southern provinces of Sudan, already disrupted by three years of rebel activity and tribal warfare, have recently been hit by swarms of locusts--making insufficient harvests shorter yet.

Prattley, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, went to neighboring Ethiopia recently to try to negotiate a safe-passage agreement with representatives of the southern Sudanese guerrillas, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

The rebel force, which has been battling the central government in Khartoum for three years, is headed by John Garang, an American-educated southerner, who launched the current campaign against the government three years ago with the announced aim of dislodging then-Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiri.

But Garang’s fight against the authorities in Khartoum has only intensified since Numeiri’s ouster in a coup last April, and all attempts at negotiation by the present government in Khartoum have failed.

Garang and most of his leadership are operating out of Ethiopia, which has supplied training bases and arms to the rebels.

Prattley said he did not make his proposal to Garang in person but spoke to members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army command, who brought back to him Garang’s negative response to the relief caravan idea.

“I had hoped that everyone concerned would look at the humanitarian issues involved,” Prattley said. “Unfortunately, it is the old story: Wars are fought on the backs of innocent people. The result of this is that a lot of people will die or be seriously deprived.”

Prattley said his conversations with the rebel officers in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, indicated that the group is planning to step up its campaign in the south in the coming weeks, possibly attempting to take control of some towns it has only been able to surround or harass from a distance.

This assessment matches that of diplomats and representatives of relief and missionary groups, who note that tension in besieged southern towns has markedly increased.

According to some of these observers, the southern guerrillas are likely to attempt a series of actions before mid-April, when national elections are scheduled. It is also likely, they say, that Garang’s forces may try to gain as much ground as possible before the onset of the seasonal rains in May. In the rainy season, much of the southern region turns swampy and roads become impassable.

Diplomats say that until about three months ago, Garang’s forces had been stalemated in the south for about a year and a half, with remote outposts passing back and forth between rebel and government control. The guerrilla forces frequently surrounded towns, cutting off supply lines, but they seldom marched in to take them over.

In December, however, the guerrilla forces attacked and held the town of Yirol, where a small government garrison was quartered, and instead of leaving, they held on. The southern forces remain there.

There has also been what diplomats regard as a significant increase of rebel activity in the southernmost province of Equatoria, where support for the insurgents has been weakest. Equatoria, with its capital of Juba, is considered the Khartoum government’s link with the south.

Equatoria has often been at odds with Khartoum, especially during the Numeiri era, but it has been even more opposed to the threat of domination by the Dinka tribe from which the guerrilla force draws most of its support.

Prattley said that his discussions in Ethiopia with the rebels centered on a plan to send relief supplies across the southern Sudanese border from Kenya. A stretch of about 50 miles of the road between the border and the city of Juba has been mined by the rebels, and Prattley said he hoped that rebel cooperation would lead to the road being cleared.

“We have the food,” Prattley said. “It is simply a matter of getting it where it is needed.”

Prattley said various donors had committed 17,000 tons of food for the operation. About 60 heavy trucks, furnished with funds raised by Band Aid, the famine relief effort by British pop musicians, could have been employed to bring the supplies north from the Kenya border.

Political observers here in Khartoum say that they were not surprised by the guerrillas’ refusal to grant safe passage to a relief convoy, since Garang’s strategy so far has been to gradually choke off supplies to the towns he has surrounded, even at the cost of causing some hardship to the population from which he draws greatest support.

The Sudanese government had given the green light to Prattley’s approach to the rebels, with the condition that any relief effort would distribute food and other supplies evenhandedly in government strongholds as well as rebel territory.

Insisted on Cutoff

However, the U.N. aide said, the insurgents would agree to the project only if supplies were withheld from government-controlled areas, a demand that killed the proposal.

Prattley said the United Nations has also considered a relief operation employing barges on the White Nile River but that this ran into the same rebel objection. Major areas of the White Nile have been unsafe for barge traffic for three years.

In December, the U.N. Children’s Fund (Unicef) organized a relief operation by barge for the besieged town of Malakal. The rebels allowed the string of barges--28 in all--to pass, but were angry that merchants and the Sudanese military sent supplies on the barge train as well. The southern force, it is said, is determined not to allow a repetition of that project.

The United Nations is looking at a rail line from western Sudan to the southern town of Wau as an alternative route. But the railway to Wau needs extensive repairs that could not be accomplished in time to relieve pressure on the area. Routes through Zaire and the Central African Republic are being considered, but observers say these are also costly and unlikely alternatives.

Grievances of South

The affected provinces of Sudan take in roughly one-third of the country’s enormous land area, but almost 50% of the total population. Southerners are, as a rule, black; the northerners Arabs, a division that exists across the sub-Saharan belt of the African continent.

For many years, the southerners have complained that their region has received far less than its share of development money and attention from officials in the northern capital.

The issue led to a 17-year civil war that ended in 1972 with the granting of increased autonomy to the south. But the war flared again in 1983 after the discovery of oil in the south and the imposition of Islamic law (even in the non-Muslim south) by Numeiri.

Although the present government seems ready to make concessions to the south, including the discussion of a federal system that would give all regions greater independence, Garang’s rebels have grown in strength and ambition, and most observers believe they are not likely to come to the bargaining table any time soon.