Sudanese Leaders Block Food Aid Despite Threat of Mass Starvation

Starvation of “apocalyptic” proportions is endangering as many as 11 million Sudanese, but their government is blocking international food deliveries, U.S. relief officials charged today.

Bush Administration officials, testifying before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, said Sudan’s military government refuses to recognize the danger and has derailed a U.S.-led rescue under U.N. auspices that would have saved many Sudanese from hunger.

“The government in Khartoum has been increasingly indifferent if not overtly hostile to the relief efforts,” said Andrew Natsios, the Administration’s top relief official.

Due to drought and civil war, this year’s harvest could fall short by as much as 1 million metric tons, leaving up to 8 million Sudanese to starve, he said.

Other relief organizations put the number of those in danger as high as 11 million, said Roger Winter, director of the private U.S. Committee for Refugees.

“If the actual level of need is as high as some people fear, and the donor community is not allowed to respond, we are looking at an apocalyptic situation worse than in Ethiopia in 1984,” said Natsios, director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. An estimated 250,000 Ethiopians died of hunger in that famine.

About 75% of the Sudanese at risk live in government-held territory, and the rest in rebel-held lands in southern Sudan.

U.S. officials accuse the government, which seized power in a military coup 16 months ago, of preventing food from reaching the south where the Sudan’s People Liberation Army has been fighting for autonomy since 1983.

The SPLA, too, has used food in its war, shooting down relief planes and attacking trains and truck convoys carrying food from neighboring Kenya.

Sudanese planes last month bombed several towns in the south that serve as center of Operation Lifeline Sudan, prompting the United States to temporarily suspend its sales of wheat to the government and to recall Ambassador James Cheek to Washington for consultations.

But the government has also prevented food supplies from reaching areas it controls and has spurned U.S. urgings to call for international help. As a result of this attitude and of the harassment of relief workers, Natsios said, European donors have all but stopped helping.

The United States, Natsios said, is willing to provide one-third of an emergency 300,000-ton food shipment needed to avert mass starvation. An estimated 50,000 tons of U.S. donated food is already being stored in Sudan, he added.