The Brutality of Nations by Dan Jacobs (Knopf: $22.95; 383 pp.) : Breakfast in Hell: A DOCTOR’S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE POLITICS OF HUNGER IN ETHIOPIA by Myles Harris MD (Poseidon: $18.95; 271 pp.)

Recent reports of the disastrous famine amidst civil war in Mozambique, a desperately poor country on the Indian Ocean coast of southern Africa, have set Western governments and private organizations to thinking about new, more reliable ways to feed starving people.

Should they be given emergency rations from boats stationed offshore? Should dramatic economic reforms be demanded of the Marxist government of Mozambique in exchange for long-term aid to build self-sufficiency? Should well-intentioned outsiders, including the United States, establish contact with and channel some relief through, the allegedly pro-Western (but actually South African-supplied), anti-government guerrillas of the Mozambique National Resistence, or Renamo--even though Renamo, by its brutal actions, appears to be causing part of the famine?

There is a temptation to believe that the dilemmas are original, that famine in Mozambique presents uniquely difficult issues.

But as these two books make clear, when it comes to starvation in Africa (as in other parts of the Third World), there really are no new problems and no new solutions. Governments, especially those being aided, invariably do not perform nobly. Political motives and intrigues easily compromise humanitarian objectives. And even after large-scale feeding programs get underway, many more people will die than seems necessary or excusable.

Dan Jacobs’ book, “The Brutality of Nations,” takes up the now all-but-forgotten case of the suffering Ibo people of Biafra, the oil-rich rebel enclave that attempted to secede from Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, in the late 1960s. Biafra was not merely trounced militarily in a brutal three-year war; as Jacobs amply demonstrates, its people were literally starved into submission. (At least a million of them died for lack of basic nutrition.)

By today’s standards--in the context of subsequent, more widespread African famines in Ethiopia and the Sahel, not to mention the crises of the 1970s in Bangladesh and Cambodia, among other places--the food emergency in Biafra may not seem so intractable. But according to a survey conducted by three American doctors at the time, the effects of the blockade and famine in Biafra were worse than any ever before medically recorded (three times greater, for example, than those during the siege of Leningrad in World War II).

The circumstances in Biafra, particularly of the children, were pathetic in the extreme. Midway through his chronicle of neglect and callousness, Jacobs cites the vivid first impressions of August Lindt, a Swiss diplomat sent to Biafra as a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross: “approaching a refugee camp, he had heard strange sounds and could not tell whether they were from birds or cats. When he got closer he realized these were the sounds of whimpering children.”

The point that Jacobs painstakingly documents is that none of this had to happen. There was plenty of food and medicine available for the people of Biafra, plenty of airplanes to get it there and even plenty of pilots willing to fly daring relief missions. However, the Nigerian federal government, for the most part supported by British and American officials (who feared that Nigeria might turn to the Soviet Union if harshly treated by the West), found means and methods to keep much of the aid from reaching those who most needed it.

Even when Yakubu Gowon, then the military head of state, appeared to soften his position on relief flights, other Nigerian officials took a tougher stance. As the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, long known as a progressive in Nigerian politics, put it at one point during wartime negotiations with relief agencies: “All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight us harder.” Indeed, Jacobs (a former aide to the late Hubert Humphrey and a former United Nations official who was involved with a private citizens’ effort to bring food into the enclave by helicopter) finds few heroes in the Biafra story. Among the most culpable, he implies, were the late U. N. Secretary General U Thant, former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and virtually the entire staff of the Africa bureau in the U.S. Department of State.

Myles Harris, an Australian physician who has worked in various places in the Third World, offers up “Breakfast in Hell” as the chronicle of his brief service as a member of a Red Cross team in Ethiopia during the 1984-’85 famine.

He, too, identifies many villains, especially high- and low-ranking officials of the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, one of the most distasteful regimes in the world. According to Harris’ account, the distribution of food to starving people ranked far below compulsory resettlement on Mengistu’s ideological agenda for converting feudal Ethiopia into Africa’s first truly Communist state.

Unlike Jacobs, Harris also spends a good deal of energy mocking and denigrating the Aidgamers (his name for the altruistic, if sometimes naive, outsiders who seek to relieve the suffering of Third World people).

Why, if he dislikes them so, he has chosen to work among them, is never really clear. Indeed, Harris is candid enough to wonder early on what his “motives were for this escapade.” If he ever figured out the answer, he does not share it.

As angry and dislikable as Harris seems to be, he does provide some extraordinary portraits of the pain and suffering of the Ethiopian people. His descriptions of life in the Bati refugee camp, where he counted 3,657 dead in just two months, are almost too painful to read.

But anyone who knows anything about Africa cannot possibly agree with Harris’ assessment that the entire continent is in a “relentless and purposeful descent into chaos” or his apparent placement of blame on, among others, “the racial equality fanatics.”

The economic picture is very bleak in Africa, and there is great repression inflicted on some Africans by other Africans; but Ethiopia is hardly typical. If Harris were to travel more widely in Africa, he would find many examples of noble struggle against insuperable odds, and even a few successes along the way.

I have some quarrels with Jacobs, too. So intent is he on building the (admittedly strong) case against the Nigerians and their allies in the Biafran war, that he seems almost incapable of admitting to the cynicism and cruelty on the Biafran side.

Jacobs appears to believe that the Biafran rebel leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, unique among all the actors in this tragic episode, was guided by the best of motives. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary--that Ojukwu considered feeding his people far less important than continuing an egotistical military struggle long after it was clear that Biafra could not survive as an independent nation.

In famine, as in war, one must be very careful about choosing sides.