Political Fights Sow Seeds of Growing Sudan Famine

This is the graveyard of good intentions.

On the outskirts of this town, the capital of Kordofan province and the epicenter of one of the worst famines to strike this region in many years, about 40,000 destitute Sudanese have camped, awaiting shipments of relief food.

On this day, El Obeid’s displaced are huddled against the force of a dry, hot wind--the haboub , which fills the air with sand and makes the squat, round tukuls , or huts, only dimly visible.

To one side is a rectangular lean-to, set off by a wire gate. It is a special feeding center established by CARE International, where children and nursing mothers or pregnant women can get regular meals of a protein-rich gruel.

Um Brina Ahmed is tall and slender as a willow, draped in a parti-colored shawl whose gaiety is belied by the mourning of her expression. Four months ago, she came to El Obeid on foot, a three-day trek from the village of El Ruda. Her mother and some neighbors helped her carry her five children. Within a month of their arrival, three of the children--ages 2, 1 and 2 months--were dead.

“They were too sick to eat,” she explained through an interpreter.

The people here are counting on surviving on the half-rations of sorghum being distributed by CARE, which has received about 200,000 tons of grain to feed a district that needs at least 25% more. At those rations, one to three residents of the camp are dying every day.

But it is unlikely that enough food will come. Despite alarms having been sounded as early as August that this would be a famine year in Sudan, scarcely more than 40% of the 1.3 million tons of grain needed in Sudan have been pledged by the outside world. Relief officials believe the rest will not be provided until--and unless--the world’s conscience is pricked by television scenes of Sudanese reduced to skin and skeletons.

“And by then, it’s too late,” said a key Western relief official in Khartoum, the capital.

Much of the donated food is only now beginning to arrive at Port Sudan, the country’s seaport. To stem mass starvation, according to international relief agencies, it should have arrived three months ago. During the lost months, food could have been stockpiled in drought areas and distribution begun. At risk are 7 million people, a quarter of the population.

The gathering calamity in Sudan is, in large part, a product of the politics of international relief aid. This is not a minor factor, for if droughts are natural phenomena, famines are not: They are man-made, the result of the collapse of market structures and inadequate national responses to crop failure.

The foundations of this famine include two intransigent forces, who wasted those three months in a political standoff.

On one side is a paranoid, xenophobic Sudanese government dominated by radical Islamic fundamentalists. The regime of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, which overthrew a democratically elected government in June, 1989, has appeared so indifferent to the fate of its threatened citizens that some diplomatic sources believe it is prepared to purposely let them die. The drought regions have, in the past, been centers of democratic opposition.

“The problem with this government is incompetence and fear and bigotry directed at the outside world and their own people,” said a leading Western diplomat in Khartoum. “Their attitude is that relief is debilitating, that it creates a habit of dependence and you have to rise above it. If people have to die in the process, that’s strengthening too.”

On the other side are Western donors, mistrustful of a regime that has not been above using starvation as a weapon in its years-long war with rebels in southern Sudan. The West’s antipathy to a regime that has scores of political prisoners languishing in its appalling jails has been magnified by Sudan’s hapless flunking of the 1990-91 litmus test of international politics, the Gulf War, by supporting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Caught in the middle are nearly 60 independent relief and development organizations trying to function in a country where they are harassed and intimidated by government agents and denied freedom to travel to their own remote relief and development projects.

Until recently, the government flatly refused these organizations any role in planning for the massive relief effort ahead.

And planning skills come at a premium in this country. Its roads

are uniformly decrepit, and the government still does not have an inventory of the trucks it will need to transport 500,000 tons of grain into the drought-stricken countryside, according to Dr. Ibrahim Abuoaf, the ineffectual commissioner of relief and rehabilitation. Importantly, the transportation has to be undertaken before May or June, when seasonal rains will cut off many famine districts from help. It may already be too late.

“This is the greatest disaster in the world this year,” said Frederick Machmer Jr., head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) office in Sudan, “and we have the least going for us.”

Estimates of the possible death toll among the 7 million Sudanese facing extreme hunger start at 250,000 and surpass 1 million. That would rival the Ethiopian disaster of 1984-85, which galvanized the world.

“It’s like capping Kuwaiti oil wells,” a leading Western diplomat said, referring to one of the legacies of the Gulf War. “We’re doing all we can just to limit the deaths to 300,000.”

As always in Sudan, hard figures are impossible to assemble. But anecdotal evidence suggests that thousands of Sudanese have already succumbed to starvation.

In the Kordofan district of Sodiri, about 90 miles northwest of El Obeid, a survey by the U.N. World Food Program has estimated that 240 to 250 malnutrition deaths a month are occurring among 120 villages.

Douglas E. Lackey, Sudan director of Save the Children Fund / U.K., was told by a village elder from Darfur province, in western Sudan at the very end of the relief-food trail, that his district had suffered 40 deaths, mostly of children, among a population of 6,000 to 7,000 over a period of a few weeks. The expected death toll among children in that time would be three.

Among the displaced, the toll is also heavy. In the camp of Suk Libya on the outskirts of Omdurman, on the Nile opposite Khartoum, three or four children are dying every month at a European relief organization’s special feeding tent. That is twice the rate experienced a year ago, and five to 10 new malnutrition cases are arriving every day. “The condition of the children and mothers coming now is much worse than those who came before,” observed Joyce Eluzai, a Sudanese nurse.

What has many people convinced that the eventual toll will be catastrophic is that after years of inflation and poor harvests, the drought’s rural victims are already weak. In some regions, one-third of the children are severely malnourished, weighing 70% or less than what is expected for their height.

“In Khartoum and the Red Sea Hills, the nutritional status is as bad as it was at the end of the last famine (in 1984)--and this one hasn’t even started yet,” a prominent economist said.

To this day, the Sudanese government has not conceded that the country faces famine. Some months ago, the governor of Kordofan, a member of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council who is perceived as exceptionally cooperative and pro-relief, took it upon himself to acknowledge that a famine loomed in his state. He was reportedly hauled back to Khartoum and placed under house arrest for a week before being returned to his post. “He used the f-word,” a Khartoum diplomat explained.

Abuoaf, the relief commissioner, argues that the word famine overstates what is happening in Sudan. “I think perhaps this word has different connotations in different societies,” he said in an interview. “To us, it means many millions of people dying. I think what we have here is a food scarcity--and perhaps a serious scarcity in some areas. . . .”

To others, a different sentiment is behind the regime’s intransigence.

“They have no money, they have no friends, they have a hell of a problem,” an international relief official said. “They have their pride, and you may say it’s time to put their pride in their pocket, but it’s all they have left.”

Throughout this period of national crisis, the government has derided donors’ motives as neocolonialist, seized crucial equipment and obstructed the movement of food.

Aid workers live in fear that they could be expelled, as several have been, at any time. A radio system belonging to the British relief group Oxfam, which it used to communicate with isolated workers in the field, was seized 18 months ago. Visas for expatriate technical workers are almost impossible to obtain, even though Sudan itself lacks the requisite expertise.

Until recently, foreign currency used for relief operations had to be exchanged at the extortionate rate of 4.5 Sudanese pounds to the dollar, about one-fifteenth of its real value. On Feb. 12, the government finally capitulated to donors’ insistence that they allow exchange at the official commercial rate of 12 pounds to a dollar--still one-fifth of the black-market rate of 62 pounds to the dollar. The resulting over-expense has on its own driven some relief organizations out of the country.

(Favored Islamic businessmen, however, can convert their foreign exchange at the black-market rate with a wink from the regime, according to a prominent economist here.)

Left with little to do until food deliveries arrive and cowed by Sudanese authorities, agencies and embassies have spent almost as much time waging turf battles and sniping at each other as they have arranging food shipments. The discord is increased by the certain knowledge that the catastrophe shaping up is so great that there will be abundant blame to be spread around.

Adding to the tension in Khartoum has been a geopolitical distraction: the Gulf crisis, in which Sudan, although dependent on aid from the West and from Saudi Arabia, sided with Iraq. The threat of war not only diverted Western attention from Sudan’s problems, but also made Western governments increasingly fretful about the safety of their diplomats and aid workers in Khartoum, which had become a refuge for Arab terrorist groups.

Just as these concerns peaked in early January, the Bashir regime demonstrated its unerring skill in aggravating a bad situation. It released from prison five Palestinian terrorists guilty of a May, 1988, grenade attack on the downtown Acropol Hotel. Seven people had died in the bombing, including two British missionaries and their two infant children; the bombers had originally been sentenced to death.

European embassies began shipping staff members home.

U.S. Ambassador James R. Cheek, who had been waging a rear-guard action against State Department pressure for the evacuation of the embassy staff, told a Sudanese official upon learning of the terrorists’ release: “You have probably just closed my embassy.”

So it was. The State Department ordered Machmer of USAID, Cheek and 70 other diplomats to leave the country. Machmer retreated to Nairobi, Kenya, where he found it almost impossible to work on Sudanese matters at long range. Before mid-January, most American staff members of relief agencies and of the United Nations were also evacuated, leaving a huge vacuum of professional relief skill in Khartoum at exactly the moment it was most needed. (Machmer and Cheek, but not their support staffs, were permitted to return to Khartoum after the war.)

These events led many relief officials in Khartoum to believe that Western donors purposely delayed food aid to Sudan out of sheer distaste for and mistrust of the Bashir regime.

For the Sudanese disaster did not come as a surprise. As long ago as August, the World Bank predicted that this year’s harvest of grain would fall short of the country’s need by at least 330,000 tons, and possibly more than 1.3 million tons.

Western donors--principally the United States, Britain, Denmark and the European Community--then began pressing the Sudanese government to declare an emergency and appeal for help. Their position was not arbitrary: Some European governments are prohibited from donating aid without such a declaration; others consider it helpful to focus their domestic bureaucracy on the crisis and to ensure that donated food does not get misused or misappropriated. Sudan’s record on both counts caused uneasiness.

But the Bashir regime resisted the pressure. In the first half of 1990, it had even exported about 300,000 tons of grain.

As it happens, donors do often provide emergency relief to needy countries without a formal appeal, especially if there is a cooperative regime. In this case, the donors did not back down. Moreover, they insisted that the government agree to several terms for the relief effort, including liberalized currency exchange, duty-free import of relief equipment and an assured role for independent relief agencies and the United Nations. The Sudanese did not agree to these points, first raised in October, until Feb. 12.

Some relief officials, though faulting the government, still consider the donors’ intransigence a fatal error. “I think they like to play hardball and be the tough guys,” said Lackey of Save the Children Fund / U.K., “and I’m not convinced that’s the way to do business in Sudan.”

The result of the impasse was that donors failed to have food in the relief pipeline early enough to avert mass hunger.

“The September-October period was absolutely critical,” Lackey said. Word that food was on its way would have restrained hoarding, which drove up grain prices and added millions to the number of Sudanese who might starve because they simply cannot afford food. Fewer victims would migrate in search of food, a process that invariably increases the death toll.

Was the donors’ concern about misappropriation of food exaggerated? “Even if 20% to 30% was diverted, you would still get 70% to 80% through,” Lackey said. “It was worth the risk.”

Another relief professional argues that even if the food had arrived before an agreement was in place, the shipments could easily have been diverted to other needy African nations, such as Ethiopia or Mozambique: “The food would not have been wasted.”

But the very worst course, he and others argue, was to risk being empty-handed, if and when an entente had been reached with the regime. That was exactly what happened.

Donors defend the delays as having been necessary to force the government to end its most obstructionist behavior.

“We needed to send a message,” said USAID’s Machmer. “We spent six weeks informing the government repeatedly that they were jeopardizing the effort. If we didn’t show we were serious, we never would have convinced them.”

For all that, many relief workers believe the government is still unconvinced. Harassment and threats of ejection continue, and all the relief agencies can do is submit as long as they can before the famine eases sometime in the fall--assuming the 1991 harvest does not also fail.

“We recognize that we’re in a position where the government doesn’t want us here,” said one European relief official, “but we’re here to ensure the survival of as many people as we can. It makes us play their game.”