In Sudan, Famine Brings Another Season of Death

Death touched Manut Nong on the road between Tonj and Mapel. It took his father first, then his mother. Manut stumbled on weakly to finish their quest.

Now the teenage boy sits on the red gravel outside the Save the Children camp here, his wasted body a confusion of sharp angles, bent knees and elbows, bowed head in his hand, as tears flow silently down his cheeks. He is naked except for a dirty brown shirt that reaches his thighs.

“I am hungry. I need something to eat,” he tells a knot of people who have gathered to stare.

“She was not talking. She just fell down and died,” he says of his mother. “She is not buried. I was there for a while hoping someone could come and help to bury her. But nobody came. So I left.”

Accepting a bowl of cereal, he begins eating, slowly and mechanically.

His own life depends on it.

Over the past month, a long-forewarned famine has struck in southern Sudan, with skeletal children dying in front of helpless aid workers, and with old people begging for a few grains of corn--food that too often is not reaching afflicted areas fast enough.

No one knows how many have died already of hunger because no one is tallying the numbers. But based on information gleaned during a tour of southern Sudan in recent days, certainly hundreds and probably thousands have already died. The World Food Program says that 1.2 million people are in danger of starving--four times the estimate just two months ago--in a famine caused by civil war, drought and displacement. And, on Sunday, Sudan’s foreign minister appealed to Arab states and international relief agencies to step up their assistance.

In Bahr el Ghazal province, death has become so common that people say they have forgotten how to weep.

“We are dying,” a woman from the Dinka tribe says on a footpath in Agaigai.

Her words burn with truth. On the parched patch of ground, about 30,000 people have gathered, camped in the shade of scattered trees, hoping for a share of a U.N. food drop--rations planned for 17,000 people. The airdrops were delayed. There is no food and little water; people are living on leaves, sipping from puddles.

Famine has come on so quickly this year that even one of the world’s longest-running relief operations, Operation Lifeline Sudan, has not been able to airlift food fast enough to stave off tragedy.

Two weeks ago, the fleet of four C-130 Hercules transport planes that drop food sacks from the sky was grounded for several days at its base in northern Kenya because cracks had appeared on the skins of the heavily worked aircraft.

The people in Agaigai had no option but to sit with their hunger, waiting for the food to come.

Eating Wild Leaves

A random stop at a tukul, a round reed-and-mud hut, reveals the drawn family of Yokjang Nhomaghot. She has lost two children this month. Her 3-year-old daughter, listless with a swollen stomach, whimpers as flies alight on a huge open sore on the back of her head.

Nhomaghot says she cannot risk a day’s walk to take the child to the nearest health center. She cannot stop the daily gathering of wild leaves that have been her family’s staple for months, and she cannot afford to miss the next food drop.

If she does, the rest of her children could die. It is clear from her demeanor that she has already written off Awut, the 3-year-old. Her hopes focus on two remaining, older children, who seem more likely to survive.

“I am not sure I will reach September,” Nhomaghot says. That’s when whatever food crops have been planted can be harvested. “If it is leaves only [to eat], I am going to die with my children.”

When food is limited, weaker members of society are the first to die.

“Women are making incredible choices now. . . . They have accepted the death of certain children, certain individuals,” says Jason Matus of the World Food Program office in Lokichokio, the base for relief operations in northern Kenya.

“These are not choices,” he adds. “These are trying to do the best with almost no choices.”

To some extent, that same cold calculus has spread to the aid community.

Relief workers know they have a disaster on their hands. Their activities are now aimed not at saving everyone but at saving as many as possible.

“It’s too late. People are dying. We see the situation very pessimistically,” says Els Mathieu, the medical coordinator for southern Sudan for the aid organization Doctors Without Borders, which has set up a network of supplemental feeding centers for children younger than 5 who are at less than 75% of normal body weight for height.

These are the children most at risk, and their numbers are rising by as much as 14% each week, she says.

“At the beginning, I thought if I worked 16 hours a day I could save southern Sudan,” Mathieu admits. “Now, I know whether I work 12 hours or 16 hours, it won’t change.”

None of this is to take away from the often heroic efforts of Operation Lifeline Sudan, the consortium of U.N. and private aid agencies that came into being after the last big famine in 1988-89, when an estimated 250,000 people died.

Despite Operation Lifeline’s nine years of work, sophisticated studies of the food economy and in-depth knowledge of the people of southern Sudan, the fighting and drought this year have brought food supplies back down to the critically low levels of 1988.

This has bred frustration. Increasingly, relief officials are saying that they cannot shoulder the burden of southern Sudan by themselves: They demand that efforts to stop Sudan’s 15-year civil war move higher up on the world’s political agenda.

Rather than pour millions more dollars every year into feeding southern Sudan, the United States--which has given $45 million in food assistance this year and promises an additional $16 million--should intervene along with other Western powers to put in place a meaningful cease-fire, they say.

War Drags On

Sudan’s war began in 1983 with a rebellion by militants in the black and mainly non-Muslim south, who complained of being discriminated against and exploited by the predominantly Arab and Muslim government in the north.

The rebels, using guerrilla tactics and small arms, have managed to hold large areas of the countryside in the south, carving out a loosely organized quasi-state that some have dubbed “New Sudan” or “New Kush,” after an ancient upper Nile civilization.

But they have been unable to control cities or large towns, most of which remain in government hands. So the war drags on into a seemingly interminable series of raids and counter-raids.

If there were roads and free access, Operation Lifeline could feed all the people. But southern Sudan is vast--about 1 1/2 times the size of California--and impenetrable, a near wilderness that swallows vehicles in its swampland.

To bring food to Bahr el Ghazal, the province at the epicenter of famine, trucks would have to drive 500 miles on muddy dirt tracks from Kenya and ford the meandering White Nile and its countless channels and tributaries. Therefore, Operation Lifeline relies on costly and inefficient airdrops.

By the start of this year, the accumulated damage of years of warfare and insecurity and two years of drought had already depleted food supplies. But unexpected events sent southern Sudan plummeting into the hunger abyss.

The first came at the end of January, when Kerabino Kwayin Bol, a bandit warlord who had for years terrorized his own Dinka people when fighting on behalf of the Sudanese government, switched sides and staged an uprising against government troops inside the garrison city of Wau.

A desperate battle for Wau ensued, which the government won.

In the meantime, 100,000 city dwellers fled to the countryside, depleting stretched food supplies.

The next blow was struck when the government in the capital, Khartoum--stung by Kerabino’s sneak attack--barred relief flights for two months because of what it called general insecurity.

With no flights allowed, food drops were impossible, and U.N. personnel and aid workers for nongovernmental organizations were forced to leave southern Sudan during February and March, critical months when people prepare to plant for the coming year and when aid organizations distribute seeds.

International pressure persuaded Khartoum to restore access by air for food aid, but by then much of the damage had been done. A new blow came in May, when the Popular Defense Force, a mounted Arab militia armed with Kalashnikovs, swooped down from the north, escorting the slow-moving government supply train to Wau. Its members cut a swath miles wide through the heart of Bahr el Ghazal, burning, killing and stealing cattle, displacing still more of the population.

As if that wasn’t enough, the rains that are supposed to start at the end of May have been scattered.

What makes it all so senseless is that most residents of southern Sudan feel they have no stake in the fighting that has caused the misery.

“They only know that when they hear the Kalashnikov, the people must run away, and they lose everything,” says Claude Jibidar, the 37-year-old field coordinator for the World Food Program in southern Sudan.

Looking ahead to next year, Jibidar says he does not know how bad things might get. “In the four years I have been here, I have seen difficult situations,” he says. “This is the worst, and it’s going to worsen.”