Amid Madness, Missions of Mercy

The C-130 emblazoned with giant black U.N. letters glides low over the green African savanna. Its nose tilts up, and from the tail of the lumbering aircraft drops a cargo that spreads out against the blue sky like delicate white flower petals.

As the packages hit the drop zone in rapid succession, the ground shakes in a staccato that sounds like cannon booms.

Dinner has arrived.

It’s costly--$20,000 for a 16-ton cargo--and inefficient.

But airdrops of grain (in this case, bags bulging with pale-yellow kernels of European-grown corn) are the best alternative the World Food Program has come up with to stave off starvation in a corner of southern Sudan where battle lines have kept fields barren and closed off ancient trading routes.

“If this relief had not come, we would have died,” said Allek Dand, 45, whose livestock was looted by marauders in the spring.

At a time when the world’s farmers harvest more than enough food to feed all humanity, 800 million people around the globe are malnourished. And the most common explanation for their hunger is not drought or overpopulation, but conflict.

This is especially true in Africa.

Civil war in Ethiopia, factional fighting in Somalia, ethnic bloodletting in Rwanda and Burundi, revolution in the former Zaire and coups such as the one last spring in Sierra Leone--these and other conflicts over the past decade have put pressure on the continent’s fragile ability to produce and distribute the nourishment needed by its 750 million people.

Turalei, a village in Sudan’s Bahr el Ghazal region, is a case in point.

Here, cars are as unknown as paved roads, and people lucky enough to still have homes sleep in mosquito-infested mud-and-stick huts thatched with reeds. Over the past year, many of the dwellings have been burned, and many of the people have fled.

It is rare to see a goat or even a hen, although vultures and hyenas flourish.

Sudan has been rent by a civil war between the Arab, Islamic north and black African guerrillas in the south who say they are treated as second-class citizens and demand secular government and autonomy.

The conflict has claimed an estimated 1.3 million lives since 1983, including 250,000 victims from a famine in 1988 attributable to the war.

Human rights groups say scorched-earth tactics aimed at starving one’s enemy have been a hallmark of the war in southern Sudan, an area about twice the size of California.

Turalei is one of the places where food is being distributed at a high price, and often at great risk, to people in time of war. But the deliveries here are erratic.

The government in Khartoum sets limits on the number and type of relief aircraft allowed. Aware of the dangers, the World Food Program restricts aid workers in this part of Sudan to a maximum of five days on the ground.

It is a hit-and-run operation. Food monitors are trained to go in quickly, hand out the food that drops from the sky and then get out before the food stores become a target for attack.

Monitors are constantly on alert to evacuate on short notice, and they report in by radio at least twice a day to assure their supervisors at the Lokichokio base in northern Kenya that they are all still “Oscar-Kilo.”

Aid Workers Face Variety of Dangers

For aid workers--an assortment of twenty- and thirtysomethings from around the world with backgrounds ranging from the Peace Corps to medicine to wildlife tourism--the operation is full of dangers. They brave land mines, tropical diseases and raids by various factions as they distribute food to a forgotten people embroiled in a little-thought-of war.

During just one four-day period that a Times reporter visited the war zone this fall, one humanitarian worker died in her sleep in southern Sudan, apparently after taking medication for a fever; another was stricken with malaria and bilharzia but directed a food distribution anyway; and a single-engine plane transporting two other aid workers caught fire while landing on the grass airstrip at Turalei.

“I think it is not that risky, honestly,” deadpanned Jeff Barthel, the disease-plagued food distributor. “In 2 1/2 years in Sudan, I’ve only been in a location that has been bombed once.”

He also allows that he once had to flee for a day and a half after a firefight, retreating with villagers and followed closely by pro-government forces.

The airdrop in October was the first to Turalei since July. The population showed it. Stick-like children, dressed in rags, emerged from the bush, rushing to collect every spilled piece of grain in their wooden bowls.

Women in pairs wrestled 110-pound sacks back to their camps to be hoarded and parceled out carefully. The ration was designed to feed 22,000 people for 45 days, but as World Food Program liaison officer Claude Jibidar explained: “We never know when we will be able to come back.”

‘Coming Year Will Be Too Much Bad’

The lanky Dinkas in this area of northern Bahr el Ghazal have enemies on four sides: a pro-government Dinka warlord based in Gogrial to the south, armed Arab militias to the north, a government-held town to the west and Nuer tribesmen from a rival guerrilla faction to the east.

A series of raids from the warlord’s irregulars during the harvest last year and the spring planting season this year devastated Turalei and the surrounding villages.

“This area especially is constantly, constantly insecure,” said Barthel, a 30-year-old native of Fresno whose skills range from conducting a meeting with community leaders to fixing a pesky radio. Before he became involved in relief work in Africa, he was a field technician at the natural science center of Cal State Fresno.

“When insecurity comes, they lose just about everything in one day: their clothing, mosquito nets, utensils. Their houses are burned, completely leveled,” Barthel said.

“Most of the people did not start cultivating due to lack of seed and tools,” said John Mangok, the county secretary of the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Assn., the humanitarian arm of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army. “The coming year will be too much bad.”

With no harvest and little trade, most people have been living off nature. During the dry season, there is nothing.

Ajak Wen, a member of a local committee working with the World Food Program, estimated that 70 people starved just around Turalei last spring after the population of 8,000 was scattered in raids by forces of a government-allied warlord.

“In this house behind you, seven or eight people starved to death,” said Wen, whose husband also died during the fighting. “They were my neighbors, but I had nothing I could share with them, and they just died. They are finished completely.”

She cares for three orphans and her own four children, who keep alive by foraging. One picks edible fruits or leaves from a tree. Another beats wild grasses for tiny seeds. A third digs into anthills to steal whatever grains the ants have collected. A fourth goes off to the marshes to fish.

At nightfall her family reunites to pool what they have found, usually enough for one scant meal.

For the Wens, survival is day to day. Like hundreds of thousands of others in southern Sudan, they have been on the edge of starvation for years.

The seed for next year’s crop has been eaten. Cows and goats have been looted. Trading has stopped because it means crossing hostile lines.

“From 1994 until today our lives have been horrible. Our way of life has been destroyed completely,” Wen said. “We are living on leaves. If not for leaves, everyone would have left this area by now.”

War Keeps Them on the Run

Raw hunger is the immediate enemy but, longer term, the undernourished face stunted growth, delayed brain development and death from even common diseases, humanitarian workers say. And the war that keeps them on the run, without bedding, blankets and mosquito nets, shrinks their chances of survival.

“When you run away, you sleep on the wet ground and you are naked,” Wen said. “Many of the very young and the old people got sick.”

Despite the food drop, she said, she is furious at the international community.

“I am angry that the world pays no attention to us,” she said. “Why do they turn a blind eye and deaf ear to our sufferings for so long--for more than 10 years--why?”

Some workers in the relief operation echo her emotions, arguing that emergency feeding in wartime does little to improve the lives of the hungry. Such action eases the international conscience while allowing conflicts to go on, they say.

“Today you give the people food, and tomorrow you may find them even more hungry. To me, that’s not the best way of doing business,” said James Kamunge, 39, a Kenyan food monitor. “This business of repeating the circle is very frustrating. I say let’s stop the war and then let the people develop.”

War-caused famine is a recurring story in Africa.

A million people may have died in the Ethiopian famine of 1983-84. Hunger brought the United States to Somalia in a 1992 mission that resulted in short-term relief to thousands but ended in political calamity. Last summer, the world was shocked by images of skeletal Rwandan Hutu refugees emerging from the dense forest of what was then Zaire. Now a new crisis looms in Sierra Leone, the West African country where a May coup has sparked five months of unrest. Officials say 200,000 people are vulnerable.

Sudan is pioneer territory for how the world deals with famine in war zones. When reporters and relief organizations became aware in late 1988 that fighting was causing massive starvation in Bahr el Ghazal province, the resulting furor forced the combatants to agree to let the United Nations in to help.

The resulting project, Operation Lifeline Sudan, is supposed to give the U.N. and other nongovernmental organizations the right to deliver food and humanitarian supplies to civilians on both sides, based on need alone.

The plan has been copied with varying degrees of success in Ethiopia, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan.

Officials Slow Relief Efforts

Although the Sudanese government agreed to the operation, aid workers in Sudan’s southern sector--which receives most of the aid--complain that officials in Khartoum rarely miss a chance to slow down their work in rebel-held areas, declaring some places off limits and permitting just one C-130 Hercules aircraft for deliveries.

Critics say Operation Lifeline gives Khartoum too much say over who gets assistance. Alex de Waal of the human rights organization African Rights said there have been “appalling abuses.”

Mark Duffield, senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s school of public policy in England, said donor support for difficult humanitarian operations such as Sudan’s has been in decline since the mid-1990s, “from Rwanda straight through to the Balkans.”

A new generation of African leaders disparages humanitarian assistance, bolstering an emerging anti-aid lobby in the West that argues that Africans should “sort out their own problems,” he said.

Duffield fears such an approach: “I am concerned indigenous people that need protection will no longer get it.”

What is done is little enough. By Jibidar’s calculations, the World Food Program is delivering a fraction of the food consumed by the 4.5 million people in southern Sudan. People otherwise get by through various “coping mechanisms” that the Western food monitors admit they only dimly understand.

Aside from fishing and scrounging for wild fruits and plants, the mechanisms include things like extended visits to far-off relatives who may be slightly better off, or sending children to work in distant cattle camps where they can survive on a diet of milk. But if war pressures are too great, even these mechanisms do not suffice.

In the first nine months this year, drops from the C-130, along with smaller deliveries from Canadian-built Buffalo aircraft that can land on dirt airstrips, had totaled 15,000 metric tons, Jibidar said. He believes that amount has been the difference between survival and disaster.

“If there was no war, no insecurity, we would not need to assist these people at all,” he said. “When food is directed well, a small quantity does a lot.”

Daniszewski was recently on assignment in Turalei.

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HOPES AND FEARS

In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of chronically undernourished people has more than doubled since 1970 from 96 million to 200 million. It is expected to grow to 300 million by 2010. Factors contributing to African poverty include:

* Poor economies.

* Reduction in social services and infrastructure investment.

* Civil wars and political instability.

* Unfavorable weather and environmental stress.

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Helping hands: Africa is the only region where per capita food production is decreasing. As a result, one in five Africans is dependent on food aid.

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Success story: Malnutrition in Latin America decreased between 1970 and 1997, while poverty--measured by income level--fluctuated only slightly. These gains in reducing malnutrition are attributed to:

* Good care practices.

* Access to basic health services, including family planning.

* Women’s empowerment in control of cash resources and education.

Poverty and malnutrition in Latin America, Caribbean

Families below poverty level in 1997: 44%

Underweight children in 1997: 7.2%

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

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About This Series

At a time when humankind has the resources to conquer hunger, 800 million people are chronically undernourished.

* Monday: International agencies are seeking innovative strategies to combat the problem at its core.

* Tuesday: Nearly 40 years after Maoist ideology led to cataclysmic famine in China, the lessons can be applied to another isolationist, hunger-racked state: North Korea.

* Today: No place in the world suffers more from conflict-born starvation than Africa, where civil war, ethnic bloodletting, coups d’etat and revolution take a tremendous toll.

* Thursday: Class divisions perpetuate hunger and turn India into a nation of contradictions: Stretches of bountiful land coexist with pockets of utter desperation.

* Friday: Scientists hope dramatic discoveries in plant genetics and biotechnology will produce a second “Green Revolution” that will help feed a swelling world population.