Proposed Flight Ban Raises Fears for Sudan Relief

The Sudan Airways planes parked in neat rows at Khartoum’s sand-swept, palm-fringed airport represent the most practical way to get around this vast, undeveloped country. But a U.N. Security Council vote coming up soon could leave these aircraft grounded for a long time.

With the support of the United States, the council is expected to decide in the next few weeks to finally implement a resolution passed in August banning foreign air travel by Sudanese aircraft.

Sudan has vigorously objected, and now some U.N. officials are raising fears that the sanctions would hamper the largest ongoing U.N. emergency relief project in the world--”Operation Lifeline Sudan”--which since 1989 has been bringing food and medicine to more than 4 million people on both sides in Sudan’s civil war.

These officials say there is a painful dilemma facing the international community: Is it more important to punish Sudan’s Islamist government for allegedly supporting terrorism and harboring international fugitives, or to provide food and drugs to war-affected civilians?

Two other countries, Libya and Iraq, already are under U.N. sanctions barring air travel. Both have complained that the limits have caused suffering and death because people cannot travel abroad for urgent medical care. U.S. diplomats say such claims should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Senior U.N. officers on the ground in Sudan, however, seem to agree that the sanctions proposed here would make life difficult for the relief effort. They cite this country’s extreme poverty and geographic isolation and a road network that barely penetrates Africa’s largest country. Christoph T. Jaeger, the U.N. coordinator for emergency and relief operations in Khartoum, the capital, believes that the sanctions--which would bar countries from allowing the government-owned Sudan Airways “permission to take off from, land in, or overfly their territories”--gradually would shut down not only most international flights, but most domestic flights as well.

This is because the Sudanese fleet would not be able to leave the country to obtain the service and parts that make its planes airworthy, and because without hard-currency earnings the airline would not have income to pay for upkeep of domestic planes.

This “could have very serious effects” on relief operations, Jaeger warned in an interview.

Aid workers use Sudan Airways to move around the country and to ship aid supplies.

“Sudan is a very vast country with very poor infrastructure. There are not many places easily accessible by road,” he noted.

The humanitarian needs are only expected to rise. Civil war recently spread from the south to the east of the country, and aid agencies fear famine is coming to northeastern Sudan due to lack of rain.

U.S. diplomats say that Jaeger’s concerns about the sanctions are based on misconceptions.

“If Mr. Jaeger had bothered to ask anyone other than the government of Sudan what measures the Security Council is actually considering, he would know the measure under consideration is directed only against Sudan Airways and will contain special exemptions for humanitarian operations and maintenance of aircraft,” declared one New York-based U.S. diplomat.

The diplomat called the sanctions “an appropriate and measured response to the offense . . . carefully targeted to have minimal, if any, humanitarian impact.”

Sudan’s main offense, in the eyes of the Security Council, is failure to surrender three men suspected of mounting the June 1995 assassination attempt in Ethiopia against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Those attackers were believed to have fled to Sudan. (The Khartoum government maintains that it could never find them, and that even if they were in the country, they have now moved on.)

The Security Council first demanded that Sudan extradite the suspects in January 1996. Sudan’s noncompliance resulted in Resolution 1070 in August, calling for the ban on Sudanese flights. But council members could not agree on when to begin the sanctions, and Russia, sympathetic to Sudan, insisted that the humanitarian impact first be investigated. A Swiss lawyer was in Sudan late last month to research that report, opening the way for the council to vote later this month or early in March.

With a per capita income of only $330 a year, Sudan lacks decent hospitals and clinics, especially outside the capital. Many seriously ill Sudanese travel abroad for treatment. As a government-subsidized service, Sudan Airways transports about 15,000 such patients a year. It also helps distribute drugs and refrigerated vaccines across the country, according to a report by the Sudanese Health Ministry.

For many Western countries, however, the priority remains to pressure Sudan’s government to alter its ways when it comes to terrorism.