Suffering Sudan Needs Our Help : Even in Face of Brutal Civil War We Can Ease Starvation

The scene in East Africa is horribly familiar. Hundreds of thousands, many of them young men fleeing fighting, stagger into refugee camps. Most of them starving after the months-long trip, they tell of thousands more who left with them but never made it.

But they are not Ethiopians. They are Sudanese fleeing into Ethiopia from southern Sudan where a civil war has caused severe food shortages and life-threatening conditions. Around the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, more than 1 million others who have fled from the south are in temporary camps--refugees in their own country.

While Ethiopia’s civil war and famine received attention for months, Sudan’s troubles have only recently appeared on the front page--and only after news that hundreds of thousands may have starved already. It is time the United States gave Sudan--a strategic though not always stalwart ally--the attention it deserves.

Sudan’s civil war between the Muslim, Arabic north and the Christian and animist, African, less-developed south costs the government well over $1 million each day. If lost potential revenue from oil sales, destruction of property, and deferred or abandoned development projects are added, the cost is even greater. In human terms, an estimated 300,000 children have died this year as a result of food shortages caused by fighting.

Sudan is among the 20 poorest countries in the world, according to the World Bank, and its finances are arguably the worst. It is in default of more than $800 million to the International Monetary Fund--the most of any country. Sudan also owes more than $12 billion to foreign governments and banks. But many of these lenders are not willing to reschedule this debt unless there is an IMF agreement, and there can be no such pact until the $800 million is paid.

The effects of this poverty are severe. Even before this year’s famine, one child in 10 died before its first birthday. Sudan has one paved highway, unreliable railroads, primitive sanitation and water supplies in all but the largest cities, and chronic food and medicine shortages.

There are no simple solutions. Ending Sudan’s political turmoil, however, would be an enormous step in improving its economic condition. The United States can help; but to do so, it must regain its influence in the country.

Ever since the successful coup against the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Jaafar Numeiri in 1985, relations between the United States and Sudan have declined, while Sudan has pursued closer ties with Libya, Iran and the PLO. The inclusion in the cabinet of two fundamentalist Islamic party members may further distance Sudan from the United States.

Sudan is too strategically important for the United States to allow it to drift away. It borders Libya on the west, controls the source of the Nile--Egypt’s lifeline--and lies opposite Saudi Arabia overlooking the Red Sea shipping lanes.

For 1989, the Reagan Administration is proposing $76 million in non-military aid for Sudan. While this amount is much smaller than the $47 million for military aid and $220 million for development and relief aid during the famine year of 1985, America remains Sudan’s largest donor.

The United States and other lending nations also could offer large-scale debt relief--such as loan forgiveness, payment rescheduling and interest-rate concessions proposed at the Toronto summit earlier this year--if Sudan ratifies the Nov. 15 peace accord with the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. John Garang, the rebel leader, has said that the south is not trying to secede but wants a representative government with power shared between north and south and the elimination of Sharia (Islamic fundamentalist) laws.

To encourage the Sudanese further, the United States should engage Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as Egypt, to support the accord. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are two of Sudan’s largest creditors, and Saudi Arabia is the second largest donor behind the United States. With our Arab allies assisting in the peace process, Sudan’s more polarized, fundamentalist National Islamic Front party would have less opportunity to block the peace process or to isolate the United States on religious and ethnocentric pretexts.

The United States also should seek an end to human-rights abuses in the south. U.S. and other Western donors should push the United Nations to investigate a growing number of reports of abductions, murder and torture by government troops or government-armed militias in southern Sudan. In an interview, Bishop Macram Max, whose parishioners include many of the victims, has said that the situation had assumed “the proportion of genocide.”

Despite Sudan’s woes, there is reason for hope. Within the last few weeks, the U.S. Agency for International Development prevailed on the Sudanese government to allow airlifts into some of the most severe famine-stricken towns. Many hope that the rebels and Sudanese government will allow relief into other contested areas.

The greatly expanded civil war in Sudan, and the famine and brutality that have resulted, deserve our concern. The political and strategic interests of the United Statesin the region deserve more attention. For both these reasons, Sudan deserves more help from us.