Khartoum Can’t Allow Starvation to Go On

The gaunt faces of starving children clinging to the skeletal remains of their mothers that fill feeding camps in the heart of civil war-torn Southern Sudan is the most poignant evidence yet of the failures of Islamic rule in Africa’s largest land-mass country. Sudan’s wrenching civil war has cost more than 1.5 million lives during the past four decades.

At the root of the conflict has been the effort of the Arab-African Muslim majority in the North to impose harsh Islamic laws (“Sharia”) on the largely animist and Christian minority populations in the South--an effort Sudanese Muslims long have claimed would better the predicament of some of the poorest people on Earth by offering a vision of modern Islamic democracy.

These efforts now have taken a sinister turn in which the Sudanese ruling military junta in the capital of Khartoum is, through its policy of neglect, allowing starvation to be used as an ethnic cleansing of the most heinous kind. Khartoum’s Islamic fundamentalists have justified the denial of food destined for the South from Western relief agencies by claiming that nonperishable foods, such as canned army rations, inevitably end up feeding rebel armies, enabling the rebels to further sustain resistance to government troops.

The rebels justify their armed insurrection, funded largely by Western governments, by saying it is only Islamic bias against non-Muslim Southerners that is behind Khartoum’s ban on famine relief flights to the most devastated regions.

The sad truth lies somewhere in between.

Given its choice, Khartoum would lose little sleep if the South voted to secede from the North next year (a secession plebiscite is guaranteed by the country’s recently passed constitution), freeing northern Muslims of their religious, economic and social burdens in the South. But the majority of Southerners, no longer engaged in guerrilla conflict, fear outright secession would simply create another Uganda or Zaire where rebel leaders would “rule,” offering them little more for their betterment than Khartoum’s Islamists have and, worse, without a viable framework for governance or even an economy to minimally provide for the people.

The U.S. and its staunch Mideast peace ally Egypt cringe at the thought of secession because anarchy in Southern Sudan could make already short water supplies from the head of the Nile rivers another casualty of civil strife.

The solution to this morass lies in an equitable distribution of Sudan’s looming petro-wealth. More than 3.5 billion barrels of highly desirable crude oil now is hidden in Southern Sudan’s savanna. Multinational oil companies from China, Malaysia and other countries are in the process of developing the oil fields and “early” oil is due to start flowing in September 1999.

But before distributing wealth to those who may not, in any case, survive starvation, Sudan’s Islamic government has a moral obligation to do everything in its power to feed its citizens. It must agree to immediately and unconditionally resume famine relief flights, using government transports to fly, truck and deliver supplies to Christian and animist tribes whose members are first and foremost Sudanese citizens. Meanwhile, Western relief agencies could reduce government mistrust by delivering perishable foods, which are harder to confiscate by rebel armies.

The government then should use the current cease-fire period, which is due to expire in mid-September, to negotiate an oil revenue sharing agreement based on rights of citizenship, not race or religion. It should address the concerns of all rebel groups, including notably that of Dinka leader John Garang, not just those factions that rightly have chosen the path of peace to prevent further bloodshed and starvation.

Using population ratios based on citizenship and augmenting the resulting income streams with war reparations would be a good starting point. Here, the U.S. government could finally play a constructive role by pressing Garang to accept reasonable proposals rather than continuing to fund (with American taxpayer dollars) his ineffective and futile insurgency effort.

Finally, Khartoum’s Islamists must show that they are willing to face the very voters who now starve under their governance. Their brand of Muslim fundamentalism is unique because it seeks to offer a credible “Islamic democracy” where citizenship is the only criteria for rights. Unfortunately, Khartoum is doing irreparable damage to its vision of modernizing Islam by insisting on the imposition of Sharia-like Islamic overtones in the implementation of theoretically nonreligious constitutional mandates.

It is time for the world to find out whether these Islamists can be true to the principles of democracy and citizenship. Actions, not words, will ultimately determine the truth of who is responsible for Sudan’s human misery.