For Sudanese, Compound Suffering: War and Famine

As if rehearsed, the throng of skeletal figures emerged into the dry clearing as soon as the hum of the cargo plane was audible in the distance. They moved quickly, many scantily dressed in rags, most barefoot, all wearing a look of excitement--and despair.

When the U.N. craft finally landed on the dirt-and-grass airstrip here in remote southern Sudan, the anxious welcome party almost came to blows in the frenzy to unload the cargo--sacks of sorghum. Old women and scraggly children scoured the earth, clawing through the clumps of grass and reddish soil in hopes of finding a few grains of seed that might have fallen from the bags.

“They’re so hungry,” Angelo Marac, the local coordinator of relief and supplies, observed of the townspeople participating in the pathetic scene. “Many have had absolutely nothing to eat in a very long time.”

This pitiful spectacle, officials say, has become all too common in Sudan. Hunger, death, disease and destruction have ravaged much of Africa’s largest nation, a country the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. Except for an 11-year period of relative calm following a 1972 peace agreement, civil war has raged in Sudan since it gained independence in 1956 from joint British and Egyptian rule.

Observers say the conflict threatens to be prolonged and the toll heightened because the leader of the main arm of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army recently rejected a peace plan hammered out by several East African regional leaders in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, earlier this month.

The southern rebels are predominantly black Africans, mainly Christians and followers of traditional African religions, and are led by John Garang. They are reluctant to relinquish the recent military gains they have scored against the Muslim and ethnic Arab Sudanese government, from whom they are demanding autonomy, exemption from Islamic law and a fair share of development money.

In April, several rebel splinter groups signed a peace accord with the government of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, agreeing to hold a referendum in four years to decide whether to remain part of Sudan or to secede. Garang dismissed the peace pact as nothing more than a sham that would do little to further the cause of southern Sudan.

As the fighting continues, innocent civilians are caught in the cross-fire. The war has claimed at least 1.3 million lives since 1983. And displacement is common, with an estimated 300,000 Sudanese living in refugee camps outside the country.

A combination of drought in some areas and flooding in others also has ruined successive harvests, leaving communities on the brink of starvation. The situation is especially acute in the south, because fierce battles have prevented aid agencies from delivering food and medicine there.

To make matters worse, the Khartoum government, exercising its rights under an agreement with the U.N. aid program here, often vetoes humanitarian flights into southern Sudan, preventing airdrops of food and visits of foreign medical staff into enemy territory. As a result, vast regions of the country have been neglected.

Marial Bai, a town of about 13,000 in the southern province of Bahr el Ghazal near strategic government troop garrisons and rail supply lines, has suffered the most because of the war. Its remote, precarious location has made it very difficult for relief groups to deliver aid there. The U.N. World Food Program, in an emergency assessment, found that 25,300 people in Marial Bai and surrounding areas are in dire need of aid to sustain them, at least until the next harvest is due in September.

Marial Bai’s people, who primarily are from the Dinka ethnic group, traditionally have been subsistence farmers and herdsmen. Their diet consists of grain and meat from livestock. But they have grown reluctant to cultivate crops, fearful of seeing them burned and pillaged by marauding Arab militias. Such forces have raided Marial Bai four times already this year--the last time in May, town officials said.

“They can harvest crops and store them, but they can never be confident that they will ever eat them,” said Simon Kuot Kuot, a local health coordinator. “The war has reduced the whole community to the same level of poverty.”

Townspeople used to trade livestock and grain for salt, soap, sugar and tea with Arab merchants at a market in Manyiel, a nearby town. But hostilities between the two communities recently put a stop to that, and now those who wish to trade must make a risky six-day trek across disputed areas to find buyers for their goods.

Many residents, however, aren’t going anywhere because they have nothing to sell. Acres of their sorghum were razed in recent raids; many of their animals were stolen. Drought is playing havoc with any efforts at farming or ranching. “The situation is very serious,” said Marac, the relief and supplies coordinator. “From mid-July, we are expecting deaths from starvation.”

That grim prospect comes atop an already hard way of life here in Marial Bai, where there is no electricity, no sanitation and few permanent brick or stone structures. Water here is drawn from wells, many of which are contaminated with parasitic Guinea worms. Malaria, measles, diarrhea and pneumonia also are prevalent here, having killed scores of children in the province, where malnutrition is common.

The U.N. has been laboring to provide health care to as many people as it can in northern Bahr el Ghazal, a province of 1.8 million people; still, aid officials estimate that only 4% of the province’s northern residents have had access to even basic health services. The New York-based aid group International Rescue Committee says that before it started working in Marial Bai in October, no one had been vaccinated there in 13 years.

While townspeople may not have much firsthand acquaintance with health care and other of the barest benefits of modern societies, they and their fellow southern Sudanese have seen an abundance of brutality and war.

Human rights groups, for example, say that abductions have skyrocketed in the south since the late 1980s, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women and children being forced into slavery in the north.

In May, Abuk Akoon got a taste of that violence. Awakened by gunfire, she grabbed her 1-year-old daughter, Adeng, and two sons, Taiip, 14, and Kout, 11, and rushed to the opening of her mud-and-straw hut. There, she said, she was confronted by a gang of men, some in military fatigues, others in civilian clothes, most with their heads wrapped in scarves.

“They told me to stay still or I would be killed,” said Akoon, a nimble woman who appears to be in her 40s but does not know her exact age.

She said she obeyed the orders of her armed assailants, whose forces she could see had set ablaze dozens of huts and fields of crops in her town. She later was forced to walk with her children and scores of other townspeople for four days before reaching the camp of her captors.

There, Akoon said, the men, women and children were separated into two groups: those to be saved and those to slaughtered. “We were told that the children now belonged to them,” said Akoon, whose narrative was translated by an aid worker. “Then they started killing people. I saw 15 people killed in front of me.”

After the raid on Marial Bai, town elders say, 23 people lay dead and scores were injured. More than 1,200 dwellings were destroyed by fire, along with several acres of sorghum. The raiders reportedly also stole 3,850 head of goat and sheep, plus some cattle.

More troubling, 67 women and children from Marial Bai are still missing and are believed to have been abducted. Town elders and human rights groups contend that the government encourages--or simply ignores--cases like these of kidnappings by militia forces.

“What we have here is a resurgence of slavery,” said Jemera Rone, a Sudan expert for Human Rights Watch / Africa in New York. “They conduct the raids for the purpose of booty. They are really interested in how to enrich themselves and the government gives them carte blanche. No one is ever punished.”

But Elsadig Osman, a Sudanese envoy in Kenya, replies: “Absolute nonsense. This is a kind of propaganda on the southern side. It’s completely unfounded.”

Osman contends that, instead, millions of southern Sudanese have voluntarily migrated north since 1983, seeking safety and finding welcome. “If there was any hint of slavery, they couldn’t have fled to the north,” Osman said. “They were fed and educated, and they are coexisting peacefully, mostly in Khartoum. They are now being catered to by their very so-called northern enemy.”

Human rights monitors, however, say that with fighting all around them, southern refugees have had no place else to run.

In Marial Bai, town elders estimate that 3,000 children have disappeared since they started keeping count in 1988.

Akoon--who had nine children, not all of them with her when she was caught by the raiders--said she tried desperately during her ordeal to cling to her baby girl. But Akoon said she was stabbed in the neck and left for dead amid a pile of corpses. She gained consciousness and managed to stagger to another town, where her wounds were treated.

Nine days after the attack, Akoon--like 11 others from here, who were abducted but managed to flee their captors and return--eventually found her way back to Marial Bai.

But she no longer had her three children and says she has no hope of seeing them again.

Faced with such family tragedies, as well as the horrors of continued combat, officials in Marial Bai say they have tried several times to make peace with the Arab militias. They say they have sent envoys north to negotiate with them, with no luck.

But then, diplomacy has done little here, or at the national level, to help resolve the conflict.

The government and the rebels, analysts say, have been reluctant to make the compromises necessary to end the war, once and for all.

President Bashir says he is willing to talk with outlawed political parties but also has made clear that he will never give up the nation’s Islamic laws, so despised by the southerners; rebel leader Garang, meanwhile, is demanding nothing less than autonomy for the south.

This has left the Sudanese, like the townspeople of Marial Bai, with little option other than to trust their fate to greater powers. “In the Bible,” said Kuot Kuot, the health coordinator, “it says that one day the world will come to an end. So, one day, this war will also come to an end.”