Sudan Starvation in a Fruitful Land

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There is, cruelly, food to be had. The land is fertile, the rains were good, and this year's harvest will be the best in a decade. But 4 million people are starving because of a civil war that Sudan has inflicted upon itself. Standing between the food and the people are 58,000 government troops and 30,000 rebels of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. On both sides the terrible weapon is increasingly food, not bullets.

More than a million people have already died in the conflict between the predominantly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south. Now some 250,000 are wasting away in Juba, the besieged southern capital, which has been virtually shut off from outside relief since September. Aweil, 600 miles southwest of Khartoum, got its last food train eight months ago; 8,000 exhausted people perished there during the summer. How many more have gone, no one knows.

Thousands on thousands of southern Sudanese are wandering helplessly through the vast bushland, leaving a trail of bones as they flee into overcrowded and starving towns, abandoning their blooming crops. They are driven to places like Juba by the two armies. The government denies the civilians food to keep it out of the hands of S.P.L.A. fighters. The S.P.L.A. rapes civilian women, steals civilians' food and mines their fields. Its aim is to cause chaos in the towns by flooding them with desperate refugees. "The government in Khartoum has turned its back on the south. The S.P.L.A. forces everyone to flee," says Major General Peter Cirillo, former governor of Equatoria province. "Both sides use food as a weapon."

Juba is a city of wanderers roaming hopelessly through muddy streets in a desperate search for food. Silent women with empty plastic buckets throng the 2-acre Konyo-Konyo Market, scavenging through its hundreds of barren wooden stalls. Only weeds, leaves and lily pods are for sale, at 50 cents a miserable bunch. Even the richest cannot find food here. A civil servant like Michael Apollo eats only one bowl of boiled weeds a day and sends his family to beg at emergency feeding centers. Everywhere people thrust themselves forward, baring their bony chests and screaming, "Look how hungry I am!"

The 24-year-old civil war is an ethnic, economic and religious struggle between the north, home to 75% of the population, most of the wealth and all of the national government, and the south, which resents at once the north's control and its neglect. The S.P.L.A., dominated by Dinka tribesmen, demands repeal of Shari'a, or Islamic law, and establishment of provincial parliaments. But the plight of the largely Christian and animist tribesmen in the south has worsened dramatically since January, when the S.P.L.A. launched an offensive, capturing the strategic crossroads town of Kapoeta and about a dozen smaller towns. In the months since, the S.P.L.A. has managed to tighten a stranglehold on all the southern government-held garrisons.