NAIROBI, Kenya -- Faced with the prospect of pictures of emaciated,
malnourished children as well as thousands of deaths in southern
Sudan, the world's governments launched Operation Lifeline Sudan
and appealed for funds to meet the "emergency."
The year was 1989. By truck, plane and barge, tons of food
and medicine were delivered to the suffering in Africa's largest
country, where a civil war was the root cause of the starvation.
Now, nearly a decade and more than $2 billion later, the situation
is virtually identical, despite what Operation Lifeline describes
as one of the largest relief operations ever. The impoverished
in southern Sudan are still starving and dying, and the war goes
on. Operation Lifeline Sudan, a consortium of two U.N. agencies
and 39 nongovernment relief organizations, has become institutionalized,
with offices and a staff at the bucolic U.N. campus here issuing
a steady flow of press releases.
The organization is now spending $1 million a day on the relief
effort. The expenditure will grow endlessly, relief officials
said last week, unless there is an end to the war, which has
already gone on for 15 years. That seems remote, not least because
neither the United States nor the European Union is trying very
hard to negotiate a settlement.
The State Department will soon declare Sudan an emergency
-- for the 10th consecutive year -- so that another $70 million
to $100 million in U.S. disaster aid can be sent there this year,
U.S. officials said. The total U.S. contribution during the last
decade has been more than $700 million.
Officials in Washington and at the relief organizations, unable
to explain even to themselves how an emergency can last for a
decade, now talk about an emergency that is "complex"
or "protracted."
Semantics do not resolve a far more serious question about
a conflict usually portrayed as pitting African Christians and
animists in the south against Muslim Arabs in Sudan's north:
Is the aid helping perpetuate the fighting, giving the factions
what they need to carry on a war in which both sides are guilty
of atrocities against civilians?
"Absolutely, absolutely," said a senior U.S. diplomat
who has served in Sudan. "They talk about the war as between
the north and south, but the donors are a major factor."
"No question," said a Clinton administration official
in Washington.
Knowing that those views would not sit well with many in Congress
or at the White House, the officials did not want to be identified.
But the same view was expressed in a dozen interviews over
the last week, by diplomats, officials and aid workers from different
countries. And it does not please the donor governments and relief
agencies that rebel leaders have bluntly declared that they expect
the aid to continue so the war can.
"People are thinking hard about this ethical dilemma,"
said a European Union relief official.
It is hard to call for an end to the aid, relief officials
say, knowing that it would mean starving children. But they acknowledge
that no one has calculated whether more lives can be saved in
the long run by substantially reducing aid to press the parties
to stop the war.
The U.N. relief operation is now supplying food for about
a million people in southern Sudan, and the death rate, which
was as high as 63 per 10,000 population in some areas a few months
ago, has declined to about 3 per 10,000, relief officials said
this week. "It's wrong to make the humanitarian agencies
the fall guys for the perpetuation of this war," said Brenda
Barton, a spokeswoman here for the World Food Program, which
is spending $154 million this year on the relief effort; UNICEF
is the other U.N. agency that is part of Operation Lifeline Sudan.
"We're doing our job," Ms. Barton said. "The
politicians have to do theirs. Where are the governments who
are funding this?"
The vast aid effort has allowed the United States and the
European Union to avoid the more difficult task of pushing the
parties to end the war, relief workers and diplomats agree. The
war in Sudan is at once more complex and simpler than a Christian-Muslim,
African-Arab conflict.
Like most wars, "it is basically about power and money,"
said a European diplomat who has followed the conflict for several
years.
Sudan's Arabs have long had both, and they do not want to
share it. But if the rebels ever defeated the government, the
warlords in the south, torn by ethnic loyalties and thirst for
power, would turn their guns and forces on one another, students
of the war and Sudan say.
Recently, the strongest rebel leader at the moment, John Garang,
the American-educated head of the Sudanese People's Liberation
Army, delivered a blunt message to a U.N. delegation. "The
SPLA has decided to continue the war," he said, according
to a diplomat. "It is up to the international community
to provide humanitarian aid."
The delegation was "outraged," the diplomat said.
And at a recent meeting with the rebels, another European diplomat
fairly shouted: "What the hell has the SPLA done to help
their people? Nothing."
No rebel movement can succeed without the support of the people,
and that requires that they be fed. Garang, whose soldiers always
seem to have enough food, has no supply lines to get food or
other stocks to the people in the south, which thus makes them
dependent on the international relief effort.
Although Operation Lifeline Sudan strives to be impartial,
delivering relief to government areas as well, the overall aid
program favors the rebels, relief workers and U.S. officials
say.
One of the principal nongovernment relief agencies working
in Sudan is World Vision, a Christian organization that has its
headquarters in Washington. World Vision, which has called on
the U.S. government to reduce its ties to the Khartoum government,
will double its programs in southern Sudan next year, to $20
million, with most of that money coming from the U.S. Agency
for International Development.
At the moment political efforts to end the war are in the
hands of something called the Intergovernmental Authority on
Development, which is made up of a half-dozen African countries.
One senior European diplomat lamented that the group was "an
excuse to do nothing," while acknowledging that the European
Union did not have a strong, unified policy for ending the war.
A senior U.S. diplomat said that Washington had "no great
interest" in trying to end the fighting. He added that the
United States could hardly play the role of a neutral mediator.
The United States has long accused the Sudanese of harboring
terrorists, and it recently launched a missile attack on a factory
in the capital; at the same time, senior State Department officials
have openly expressed sympathy for the rebels.
The United States could, however, use its considerable influence
with the rebels, European officials say, to help bring about
a comprehensive cease-fire and an embargo on arms deliveries
to both sides.
If there is not "some political movement" toward
ending the war, said a European relief official, the relief bill
is going to soar. "You ain't seen nothin' yet."
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