Sudan Threatened with Disaster

When a rising tide of refugees briefly provoked rioting in the city of Port Sudan three years ago, Sudanese President Gaafar Nimeiri came under mounting pressure from some members of his government to close his nation's borders. Nimeiri would have none of it. During a climactic Cabinet meeting on the issue, he interrupted the debate and dramatically invoked the ancient Arab tradition of hospitality toward strangers. Said the President: "They are the guests of Sudan."

To his credit, and possibly to his regret, Nimeiri has stuck by those words ever since. Even as the epic famine sweeping Ethiopia has increased the number of victims crossing into eastern Sudan to some 3,000 daily, Nimeiri has continued his nation's traditional open-door policy. Yet despite a fast- building effort by local authorities and international relief agencies to provide food and shelter for the Ethiopians, the refugees are finding themselves in a nation that is almost as bereft of aid as the one they left. There are now about 1 million refugees in the country, and their numbers could swell by 600,000 by the end of March, relief officials predict. The worsening plight of the region, says a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, is rapidly becoming "a disaster of major proportions."

Nor is the refugees' arrival the only major crisis confronting Sudan and its beleaguered President. Plagued by the same lack of rainfall and economic mismanagement that have devastated Ethiopia, up to a quarter of Sudan's 21 million citizens are facing the threat of extreme hunger in the months ahead. In the southern part of the country, a rebellion waged by armed guerrillas against Nimeiri's high-handed Islamic rule is growing, and the provincial capital of Juba is in danger of attack. Though Nimeiri had freed almost 300 of his jailed political enemies in December and January, just over a week ago he publicly hanged one of his more persistent adversaries. Known as a wily survivor over almost 15 years of rule, Nimeiri has never before faced such a formidable array of challenges.

One of his trickiest political problems has been the arrival among the refugees of Ethiopian Jews, called Falashas (the Amharic word for strangers). The remnants of an ancient tribe that has kept alive Jewish religious practices, these Ethiopians became the object of a secret evacuation by Israel, code-named Operation Moses. According to various estimates, between 3,000 and 7,000 of them reached Israel before word of the rescue operation leaked out. Nimeiri, whose government is a member of the Arab League and has no diplomatic relations with Israel, was embarrassed by the spotlight on Sudanese cooperation in the resettlement and ordered the airlift cut off. That left several thousand Falashas still in Sudan, many with relatives already in Israel.