A Strategic Famine in a War-Ravaged State

When the last gasp escaped 11-year-old Majun Major’s skeletal body he was just a few paces from a feeding center that should have been able to save his life.

But he was too far gone in a famine that has killed thousands of southern Sudanese this year.

Turned away by the feeding center, Major’s family sat in the shade of an acacia tree, boiling the old, brittle, infested cowhide they had slept on the night before. They had no other food.

A decade after a famine that killed 250,000 people--and led to the creation of the world’s longest-running relief program, the United Nations’ Operation Lifeline Sudan, to feed civilians across enemy lines--Sudan again faces catastrophe. Fifteen years of civil war have killed as many as 2 million people and displaced some 4 million more.

The United Nations’ World Food Program said 2.6 million of southern Sudan’s 5 million people face starvation: 1.2 million in rebel-held areas; 1.2 million in government garrison towns; and 200,000 in transition areas. (Sudan’s population is 32 million.) “This is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world in the last decade,” said John Prendergast, director of African affairs at the National Security Council.

Yet, these are not a helpless or a hopeless people. Curiously, they face starvation not because they are poor but because they are rich in such resources as oil, grazing lands and water.

Hunger is no stranger to the Dinka of southern Sudan. In normal times, they are pastoralists who herd cattle and grow subsistence crops like sorghum and groundnuts to supplement their diet. They have learned to cope with drought and the effects of war.

A tall, handsome tribe who lope over the parched, featureless savanna in the scorching heat, they signal resilience and hardiness in this hostile landscape. But this year they were pushed over the edge. The Dinka suffered a complete breakdown in their livelihoods and had no means of fending for themselves.

Simply put, the civil war pits the Islamic government in the north against the southern Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, or SPLA, which represents the mainly Christian and black African south. Stalemated on the battlefield with the rebel SPLA, the government of Sudan is waging a proxy war on the civilian population in the south.

Some, like former World Vision Sudan Director Bruce Menser, call it murder. Dan Eiffe of Norwegian People’s Aid, a former Jesuit priest turned advocate, labels the government’s strategy nothing less than genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Operation Lifeline Sudan--the umbrella organization that delivers food to all parties--was disastrously slow to act early last year. The result: thousands dead from starvation, says Jeff Drumtra, Africa analyst at the U.S. Committee for Refugees. Even with the massive food drop, severe food shortages will continue through September 1999.

For the famine is man-made. The government of Sudan wants the land without the people. And it has not shied from using hunger and food as weapons in the war against innocent women, children and the elderly.

Their goal is to secure the sizable oil reserves of the Bentiu fields. If there is an eventual peace settlement to this grinding civil war that provides autonomy to the south or splits the country in two, Khartoum wants to push the border southward to exploit the oil, tap the water sources and secure the grazing lands.

The first sign of the government’s strategy came Jan. 28. Renewed fighting in the government garrison town of Wau forced 350,000 people to flee into the countryside in a 24-hour period. Five days later, Khartoum cited security concerns when it slapped a two-month ban on all humanitarian flights. It was a calculated move at a critical juncture.

It stopped aid agencies from bringing in tools and seeds that the people needed to plant and cultivate. Aid agencies pulled out their workers, blinding the World Food Program and nongovernmental organizations to a tragedy that was turning into a catastrophe on a scale not seen since the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine.

Hundreds of thousands of people were once again on the move, searching for food and refuge. People scavenged for wild foods in January, foods they usually fall back on in the lean months between April and August, before the crops are harvested. It was a warning sign that went unheeded.

When Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir’s government lifted the flight ban April 2, the crisis was out of control. The numbers of starving people jumped from 350,000 to 700,000. In June, the U.N. said 1.2 million faced starvation in the rebel-held areas of the south alone.

The opaque language of the U.N. became transparent. The F-word replaced “pre-famine” and “hunger gap.” By then, say advocacy agencies like Norwegian People’s Aid, World Vision and Doctors Without Borders, it was too late. By April the rains had come, if only sporadically, making it hard to truck food into the area. The only way then was to airdrop food into the remote regions of Bahr el Ghazal, the province worst hit. That upped the price from $200 a ton to $2,000 per ton.

Then came the bombs. From January to September, Khartoum launched 40 bombing raids on feeding centers, hospitals, clusters of displaced people and development projects. U.N. security officers in Lokichokio say there are no military targets in the places hit. Nor are any of the places close to the front line.

Arab militia, together with the government’s Popular Defense Force, a paramilitary organization, inflicted terror on the Dinka with slave raids. Cattle were stolen, children killed or forced into slavery, communities disbanded and villages razed.

The SPLA are not innocent bystanders. A breakaway warlord, Kerubino Kwanyin Bol, waged his own four-year campaign of terror, pillaging and plundering huge tracts of Bahr el Ghazal in raids that further caused conditions of famine and hardship. And the SPLA stands accused by Human Rights Watch of manipulating the civilian population with food aid in the early ‘90s.

Only a broad political settlement, not the temporary cease-fire now in existence, will alleviate the insecurity that caused the famine. The SPLA’s fight for basic human rights and freedoms must be addressed in those peace talks. But, in the short term, humanitarian organizations must help develop the south’s infrastructure and build institutions of democracy. They must get the seeds and tools in place to prevent what will inevitably be a bleak winter because of this year’s poor harvest. Organizations such as Norwegian People’s Aid, which operates in defiance of the government and outside Operation Lifeline Sudan, must be bolstered so that the government doesn’t have a stranglehold on aid flows.