Twisted politics and starvation

“When you see the starving Rwandans or Somalis or Bosnians staring out of your television screens with solemn dignity, you get the idea that such places must ... be entirely populated by emaciated children lining up for food handed out by heroic aid workers,” writes journalist Deborah Scroggins in “Emma’s War,” a compelling and disturbing book about the troubles plaguing Sudan (and many other African nations), and the role she believes Western intervention has played in perpetuating them.

Those images, she tells us, fail to show the “manic excitement” of the camps, where those with power, whether through money or guns, are the ones who reap the benefits. “The aid workers try to cover it up

Scroggins artfully arranges these aspects around two key stories. The primary tale, set in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, tells of Emma McCune, a charismatic and romantic British aid worker. “ ‘In my heart, I’m Sudanese,’ ” McCune says of her fascination with the people and the country. Arranging education for children, she falls in love with Riek Machar, a leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, or SPLA. Machar is a key player in the civil war that has all but destroyed the country. (The longest-running civil war in Africa, the conflict has racked up an estimated 2 million deaths since 1983.) Pitting factions of the Christian and pagan south (including the SPLA) against the northern Islamic government (not coincidentally backed by Osama bin Laden, who, until six years ago, lived there), the war seems to have oil rights at its core.

By becoming the warlord’s wife and taking up his fight, McCune blurs the supposed delineation between the neutral assistance offered by the aid community and outright support for one faction. In her drive to improve the life of the people she’s come to love, she blinds herself to the harm done by her husband’s activities (she denies the existence of a massacre in which Machar played a leading role) while she shapes the reality of the situation around her to suit her idealized self-image. To fellow aid workers, McCune becomes “a symbol of how a relief organization meant to be neutral had become part of the machinery of the civil war.” To Scroggins, McCune is emblematic of the misplaced goodwill that constitutes much of the West’s humanitarian efforts.

Woven throughout are Scroggins’ own experiences covering Sudan for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, witnessing cases of child slavery and overwhelming starvation. This personal narrative balances the account, showing how heart-wrenchingly difficult situations like Sudan are. After seeing starving conscripted child-soldiers tended by well-fed warlords, she asks whether, by considering children innocents and more deserving of food than adults, the U.N. inadvertently encourages groups like the SPLA to starve children in hopes of receiving more aid.

We in the West, Scroggins suggests, like to see ourselves as gallant saviors, bringing redemption to those in need. When our efforts fail to fix the problems, though, we’re just as happy to change the television station.

Scroggins detects some of the roots of the rage that fueled the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks as she considers the U.S. intervention in Somalia and other countries on the Horn of Africa a decade ago. On Sept. 11, she writes, “Osama bin Laden’s followers smashed the smug conviction that it is up to us to choose whether to tend to the world’s festering sores or to turn our backs on them.” Western intervention, “carelessly entered and even more carelessly exited,” she argues, has “borne evil fruit.”

As we read headlines of threatened war in Iraq, this book, with its incisive examination of the West’s intervention in Third World counties and its resonating effects on the web of humankind, should be required reading.