|
Copyright 1998 Guardian Newspapers
Limited
The Guardian (London)
August 22, 1998
The famine business
by Kevin Toolis
Sudan is suffering the worst famine in its history. And it
is caused not
by drought but by civil war. The aid agencies are pouring in
relief, which
in turn enables the combatants to continue fighting. Kevin Toolis
argues
that western governments should call a halt to a policy that's
failed.
There was no song in the morning for Ayp
Mo. Just a grave, dug by her
grandmother, in the green fields of Ajiep. The starving one-year-old
had
died the night before and been carried to the burial ground wrapped
in a
grey-and -red blanket. In a last moment of tenderness, Ayp Mo's
18-year-old mother, Ayak Agau, took a gourd of water, kneeled
before the
grave, and washed her child's body. The water glistened, tracing
out every
terrible detail of the child's emaciated skeleton and running
down to the
earth between her mother's knees. The bottom of the foetal-shaped
grave
was lined with a World Food Programme bag. Ayp Mo's body was
placed
within, as if returning to the womb. Her grandmother broke off
the yellow,
blue and red bracelet that hung around the infant's neck, and
pulled off
the tiny metal ankle bracelets. Turning her back to the grave,
Ayak Agau
cast the first earth behind her, on top of her first-born child.
There
were no prayers, no ceremony and no tears.
This child's life need not have been lost.
It should not have been
lost. But it was. Just feet away, more holes were being dug,
and three
other mothers queued to bury their children, like animals, in
the ground.
Beyond them lay 80 to 90 mounds in the earth, marking other graves
in
Ajiep's famine fields in Gogrial county, south Sudan.
Ajiep, in the province of Bahr el Ghazal,
racked by civil war, is
little more than a waystation on the road to hell - the epicentre
of a
famine that is now ravaging southern Sudan. Ayp had died in a
Medecins
Sans Frontieres (MSF) centre - a few miserable straw huts
surrounded by
an angry swarm of desperate humanity - that is feeding 2,700
children a
week and expects to have to feed 5,000 in the near future. Without
the MSF
team, many of those children would starve to death. Across southern
Sudan,
an estimated 1.2 million people are at risk from famine. And
there is no
end in sight to this suffering, no end to the line of thin, bony
children
with the plastic bracelets on their wrists that denote who deserves
rations and who does not. The next real harvest will be in a
year's time,
in October 1999.
In the comfort of our sitting rooms, the
familiar pictures have rolled
across our television screens. The huge-headed, skeletal children
- almost
like aliens - covered in flies, lying on the floor of a mud hut
or sucking
vainly at their mother's wizened breast. Or a mad, frenzied mob,
fighting
in the dust for the aid that our planes have dropped from the
skies. Or
the also-familiar blond female aid worker feeding the black child.
These are distressing images. Ajiep is
a terrible place of misery,
hunger, flies and the stink of shit. It is entirely understandable
that
anyone watching those pictures would want to help to save those
children
by giving money. And, along with the pictures, come the
appeals: from
Oxfam, Save The Children, Merlin (Medical Emergency Relief International),
MSF. Or, in the case of Sudan, a joint televised broadcast in
May by the
Disasters Emergency Committee on behalf of the top 12 British
agencies
that raised more than pounds 8 million in three weeks.
The message was
simple: give money and save starving children such as Ayp Mo.
When Clare Short, the International Development
Secretary, criticised
the appeal as unnecessary and misleading, stressing that the
cause of the
famine was war, not drought, she was howled down by outraged
MPs and
bewildered aid agencies. Who could possibly question something
that is so
obvious, so incontestably right? Who could deny a hungry child?
The major
charities are the last sacred totem of late 20th-century Britain,
and have
been largely immune from public scrutiny and public criticism.
But the
history of recent disaster emergencies such as Somalia, Rwanda
and now
Sudan prove that the aid world's simplistic mantras are very
far from the
truth. 'High-profile interventions from the outside obviously
have a role
to play in relieving immediate human suffering, but they also
contain a
very large possibility of prolonging the conflict,' says Rakiya
Omaar, of
African Rights, an agency that has been severely critical of
the work of
charities. 'They can end up giving a helping hand to one or other
of the
combatants. This is an issue that non -governmental organisations
(NGOs)
are not willing to address - and that is because it is a matter
of
institutional survival. They need a presence on the ground to
raise money
and justify their existence. But they will not ask themselves:
'Are we
making a bad situation worse? Are we prolonging the war?"
This is not a
rhetorical issue, but a very real one that has been painfully
learned,
though not necessarily addressed, in the debacle of Operation
Restore Hope
in Somalia in 1993, in the feeding of the Hutu army of genocide
in the
refugee camps in Zaire in 1994, and in the Serb siege of Sarajevo.
'I see this as the central issue of this
decade,' says Roy Williams,
head of the foreign disasters office in USAID, the largest governmental
development agency, with a budget of billions of dollars. 'In
the past, we
have acted on a simple sense of moral outrage, as if that was
the only
reality you had to operate in. But, as in Rwanda and Bosnia,
we found that
there were others all too willing to take advantage. We have
got to help,
but how can we be sure that we're doing the right thing, rather
than
acting just on a sense of outrage? We are still working at it.'
Williams's
words point to the hidden contradiction that underpins the famine
business. It is the contradiction between the simplistic, emotive
messages
of starving children, promulgated by the media and the messy,
confused
political reality. That reality - what the aid agencies euphemistically
term 'complex emergencies' - includes disasters induced by war.
No one
can explain the complexities of Sudanese politics in three minutes
of
prime-time television. But everyone can relate to starving babies.
It is
in the institutional interests of NGOs to repeat this simple
message and
raise funds from a concerned public or from a pressured government.
But
those funds then have to be spent in the political minefield
of Sudan,
where real-life warlords and a tyrannical government are in power.
And
where there is no escape from the politics of war, regardless
of how kind
or generous or humanitarian your intentions are.
For understandable reasons, no one from
the aid world wants to talk in
public about the diversion of food aid to fighters, the manipulation
of
aid workers by combatants and the reinforcement of the authority
of a
nasty government/warlords by agencies working in their territory.
Such
issues would only confuse the public and compromise that vital
but naive
humanitarian desire to help by handing over cash.
In Sudan, as in other conflict zones, there
are rules and agreements
about not feeding fighters, but everyone knows they are a farce.
'It is
very difficult to ensure that aid does not reach the warring
parties,'
says Monyluak Alor, a rare Sudanese member of the Unicef team
that runs
the Humanitarian Principles Programme that governs aid agencies'
conduct
inside Sudan. 'At the end of the day, none of the NGOs can ensure
that it
does not happen.' Although these are awkward issues, it is important
that
they are discussed in public. Ayp Mo, and thousands of children
like her,
have starved to death because of a war that has lasted 16 years.
For the
past nine years of that war, the international community has
run the
largest relief operation in history, Operation Lifeline Sudan
(OLS), to
save them. It did not save Ayp Mo. But the question we must ask
is this:
did we unknowingly, by the collective sum of our good intentions,
help to
kill her? The war is normally explained as a struggle between
northern
Muslim Arabs versus southern black Christians : the Islamic regime
in
Khartoum wanting to forcibly convert and politically enslave
the southern
population. The reality is more complicated: in the past ten
years, the
southern opposition has splintered and fragmented along tribal
lines, or
even into warring factions within the same tribal group, such
as the Dinka
or the Nuer.
The warlord immediately responsible for
the devastation in Bar El
Ghazal, including Ajiep and the nearby government-held town of
Wau, is
'Major General' Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, the one-time founder of
the main
rebel movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). Kerubino,
a
Dinka, later fell out with the SPLA's autocratic leader, John
Garang,
himself a Dinka, who for several years had Kerubino imprisoned.
Kerubino
escaped, changed sides and, in 1994, led the Khartoum regime's
militia in
Gogrial county, his home area, destroying crops, raiding cattle
and
burning down aid agencies' compounds. Then, in January this year,
Kerubino, who is widely regarded as psychotic, switched sides
a second
time, and briefly took Wau from government troops, before losing
it six
hours later. He is now back with Garang, but there is no stopping
the
famine he created in his home province. And now the Khartoum
government
and the rebels' humanitarian wing, the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation
Association (SRRA), are both pleading with the international
community to
save the people Kerubino tried to destroy.
The southern rebel cause - to resist the
forcible Islamicisation of
their society - is a just one, but there is no clear moral authority
on
the ground, only varying degrees of bad guys. Kerubino is just
another
example of Khartoum's ability to exploit tribal or personal divisions
in
the southern opposition. Kerubino's son-in-law, Paulino,
a Nuer commander
allied to Khartoum, is currently fighting the forces of another
warlord,
Riek Machar, also a Nuer and also allied to Khartoum.
In mid-July, the government and the rebels
declared a three-month
ceasefire to facilitate aid relief, but few Sudanese expect it
to last. 'I
do not see any chance of peace in the near future,' says Alor.
'The
parties are entrenched. The war will definitely go on.' All the
talk by
Western politicians, and press statements by NGOs, about building
on the
ceasefire is just hot air. The prospects for long-term peace
in Sudan are
still remote.
Continues...
|
