Drought and human folly produce another shocking famine

THE FLAT, PARCHED PLAINS OF SUDAN SEEM to run on endlessly, right over the horizon. Outside the few towns, there are no roads, no telephones, no electricity. The country is a vast emptiness of almost 1 million sq. mi.; yet it is home to just 28.5 million people, and the only way to get from one place to another is to walk. If you are starving, it can take days or weeks to stagger to one of the dozen feeding centers run by international aid agencies. That is what thousands of stick-figured Sudanese are doing right now: trekking desperately in search of food, tottering, often falling into the dust to die, sometimes within sight of their goal. Across the pitiless expanse of Sudan, starvation threatens 2.6 million people, of whom 350,000 may be facing death.

Yet it is nothing new. For much of the past two decades, every three or four years, like clockwork, the country lapses into famine brought on not just by devastating drought but also by the combined follies of nearly everyone involved. The 15-year-old civil war between the Islamic government in Khartoum and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south has stripped the country virtually to the bone and slaughtered an estimated 1.5 million people. When the fighting is going badly for its side, the government tries to starve the rebels into submission by cutting off food aid. The rebel fighters routinely take food from civilians to sustain themselves or block supplies from reaching the territory of their factional rivals. And the aid community stands accused of docilely submitting to the strictures of the Sudanese government rather than pushing through the assistance the country urgently needs.

There has been vicious warfare on and off since Sudan's independence in 1956. Africa's largest country is really two: an Islamic, Arabized north and a Christian, animist and African south. The government in Khartoum is headed by Lieut. General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, but the real power is Hassan al-Turabi, a radical scholar who leads the National Islamic Front and is intent on enforcing Muslim law on the land. On the battlefield, the shifting coalition led by John Garang's SPLA has been successful recently, opening a new front in the northeast. Officially the rebels are fighting for self-rule, but their private agenda has always included a slot for outright independence. The regime in Khartoum, weary of a war that is costing $1 million a day, and increasingly unpopular as it seeks to draft the nation's reluctant youth into the fruitless fight, is ready to talk about autonomy for the south; Garang, with visions of victory, refuses.

But peace is the commodity the Sudanese people need most. Their starvation is all the worse because it is so unnecessary. Southern Sudan offers some of the most productive land in Africa, and the people who live there are hardworking farmers and herdsmen, past masters at raising cattle, coping with scanty rainfall and husbanding seeds. If the battles would only end, they could make it on their own. Instead, tens of thousands of them are likely to die in this famine and the next one, which is sure to come.

Questions

1. What are the causes of the famine in Sudan?<

2. What is the basis of Sudan's civil war?

Answers

Next Article >