In 1989, following a previous famine caused by war, in which hundreds
of thousands perished, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) was established to
provide humanitarian aid on both government and rebel sides of the
conflict. It set a precedent for NGOs working in war zones. It was also, 
in theory at least, a major diplomatic breakthrough. It was the first
relief operation where a government allowed the big UN agencies - the
World Food Programme (WFP)  and Unicef - and the NGO charities working
under their umbrella to aid rebel-held areas and thus violate its own
national sovereignty. OLS's mission statement boasts: 'The humanitarian
imperative comes first.' Logistically, the war zone in southern Sudan is
one of the most difficult places on earth in which to operate. It is
larger than Britain, and has no roads, no electricity and no
infrastructure outside a few isolated and besieged government garrison
towns. It is a land of endless bush, villages, nomadic cattle herdsmen and
subsistence farmers. The per capita income is estimated at $ 200 per
annum, but this is probably an over-estimate; the rural Sudanese are the
poorest people on the planet. Realistically, aid must be expensively
delivered by air to a network of poorly-maintained dirt landing strips.
During the rainy season, many of these airstrips are inoperable - in Ajiep
in late July, aid workers of the French aid agency Urgence et
Developpement Alimentaires had been waiting more than a week for the next
plane-load of supplies.

    To cope with such appalling practicalities, OLS has grown into a
labyrinthine bureaucracy with thousands of staff, offices in Nairobi and a
forward logistics base, Lokichokio, in northern Kenya - now one of the
busiest airports in Africa. OLS has become the largest air relief
operation in history.  The two most important agencies involved are WFP
and Unicef, but there are now upwards of 35 separate aid agencies, each
with its own agenda, in the OLS consortium.

    Like all bureaucracies, OLS is keen to promote the efficacy of its
programmes. There is a bibliography of papers on the complex anthropology
of the Nuer, the number of children fed at each feeding centre, the nature
and balance of wild foods, nuts and fish in the Dinka diet, and the cost
per metric tonne of the WFP airborne maize - $ 1,750, ten times the price
on the world market. Yet no one seems to know how much OLS has cost.

    According to OLS's own figures from a 1996 review, UN agencies and the
NGOs spent $ 566 million between 1993 and 1995, an average of $ 200
million a year.  One conservative estimate puts the overall cost of OLS
since 1989 at more than $ 2 billion. By the end of next year, that figure
is likely to rise to $ 3 billion. That is an awful lot of aid - and yet
the people of southern Sudan are no better protected against famine than
they were in 1988.

    The root cause of this anomaly lies in the OLS agreement itself, and
in the principle of 'negotiated access' that underlies all NGOs'
operations on the ground in southern Sudan, and in many other conflict
zones. In order to win the agreement of the Khartoum government to allow
foreign NGOs to operate in both government and rebel-held territory, the
international community - as represented by various senior UN bureaucrats
- had to strike a deal with the government, thereby giving it control over
many aspects of the relief operation.  Crucially, Khartoum retained
absolute control of the air. Every flight, from the movement of food aid
to that of key personnel, had to be cleared 48 hours in advance with
Khartoum. And Khartoum had the power to ban all or any flights.

    Following the fighting in Wau in January, Khartoum banned all flights
until the end of March - a key time for the delivery and planting of seeds
to ensure the future harvest. The flight ban, of course, did not apply to
Khartoum's own military aircraft, which bombed the rebel-held towns of
Torit and Kapoeta in the far south.

    Because OLS is a UN bureaucracy, it is institutionally incapable of
challenging the dictates of a totalitarian government. International civil
servants' protests will never be a match for the actions of a regime with
a proven track record in the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Despite
warnings of an impending catastrophe, no senior OLS figure even protested
- publicly, at least - over the flight ban. Meanwhile, many NGOs operate
on both government and rebel sides, and so were also silent, for fear of
antagonising Khartoum. Instead of being a humanitarian breakthrough to
save the poor, OLS has become a Faustian bargain - the aid agencies are
the silent allies of the principal aggressor and, to guarantee access to
that same aggressor's victims, are prepared to make a pact with a Sudanese
devil. In order to aid the poor, the international community must also
feed Khartoum's besieged garrisons in the south of the country - garrisons
that would have fallen years ago without WFP grain. Of course, all the
relief delivered to the garrisons is supposed to go to the civilian
population, but NGO workers' monitoring of relief operations in government
areas is strictly controlled by Khartoum. Food is power in Sudan.  And
from where else, realistically, is Khartoum going to feed its besieged
soldiers? The systematic diversion of aid has become part of the standard
operating conditions of being in the 'field'. Agencies work on the
principle of 'neutralism', treating killers and victims as equals and
calling for a ceasefire. Whether the status quo is just or unjust is of no
concern - no agency has ever withdrawn from the field because of the
cruelties of 'their local partners', only when aid workers have been
threatened or, in rare incidents, killed.

    The rebel SPLA also signed up to the OLS agreement, because it, too,
saw the benefits of 'taxing' food distributions. On the rebel side, it's
easier to see where the food is going. Nevertheless, in Ajiep, the MSF
team has fought constant battles with the SRRA, the rebels' so-called
'humanitarian' wing.  Despite their charitable work, SRRA officials
constantly follow clinic workers around, as if shadowing foreign spies,
ban them from certain areas, insist on 'vetting' all the Sudanese staff
employed by the clinic, and even want to put their own 'policemen' on the
payroll as security staff. A significant amount of food aid was stolen,
and it is obvious to aid workers that some children were receiving triple
rations.

    'Whenever I see a fat kid, a little buddha, come through the line, I
want to scream,' says one MSF worker. 'To get there, he must pass through
three barriers. You tear up his distribution card, but there he is again
the next day.  The local SRRA make things very difficult, they want to
control things without offering security. 'You must work with us.' I would
rather work with the local chiefs.' Famine is not like queueing for bread;
it is a fight for survival. And it is understandable that individuals or
groups will seek to protect their own families at the expense of others.
Naive Western notions of feeding the hungry by need are always going to
clash with the complex social structure of Sudanese society. But the
battle over who actually gets fed at the MSF feeding centre in Ajiep is
symptomatic of how any outside agency entering a war zone will become
caught up in the conflict. Despite the aid agencies' protestations to the
contrary, there is no neutral space in a war zone.

    The years of 'negotiated access' have not ameliorated the effects of
the war; rather, they have frozen the lines of conflict and left the
international community to pick up the tab. Ajiep's afternoon skies are
filled with the sound of UN aircraft beginning their descent into Wau,
just 25 miles away, to feed the estimated 120,000 starving people there.
But the sound of the planes can be of little comfort to the 20,000 hungry
people gathered around the Ajiep airstrip.

    Institutionally, the big charities need disasters to generate income.
MSF has an annual budget of $ 250 million, Oxfam pounds 91 million, Save
The Children pounds 72 million. They are all substantial bureaucracies,
with buildings, permanent staff and impressive PR departments to maintain.
Their senior executives are important people who yield real clout in some
government circles. Much of the NGOs' effort is devoted to long-term
development work that is unglamorous and receives little attention: rural
hand-pump installation projects in northern Tanzania do not make
prime-time.

    By contrast, high-profile aid operations provoke a burst of media
coverage, a ready flow of public donations and intense pressure on
government departments.  Government funding of disaster relief is always
channelled through the charities, sometimes doubling or even tripling
their income. Under the complex funding formula of the May Disaster
Emergency Committee Famine Appeal, Oxfam received nearly pounds 2 million
in just three weeks. MSF, which has the largest operation in Sudan,
received less than 2 per cent of the pounds 8 million that was pledged in
all, and is now engaged in a fundraising operation to raise pounds 1
million, and, for the first time for a NGO, is using television
advertisements as part of its campaign.

    'If it (the relief operation) disappears completely from the
television, then people understandably forget,' says Anne Marie Huby,
executive director of MSF's UK branch. To aid its fundraising efforts, MSF
has a 'brand' identity - its thatched huts have flags bearing the MSF
logo; its vehicles are emblazoned with MSF stickers. And the white arm in
the advert or television broadcast holding the starving black child will
be attached to an MSF logo T-shirt.  Like many NGOs, MSF positively courts
media coverage of its operations.

    Those images of starving children also put pressure on ministers to
react.  Despite her notoriety, Clare Short's department is now, as one aid
worker described it, 'in a flurry of writing blank cheques' for anything
relating to Sudan. And similar cheques are being written all over Europe.

    However crude it sounds, disasters are good for NGO business.
Provided, of course, that it is not too dangerous for relief workers to
operate on the ground, access for TV crews is reasonably easy and the
victims are photogenic.  Sudan fulfils all the conditions for a good
'complex emergency'.

    Twenty minutes flying time from Ajiep - or an eight-hour walk - is
Adet, the site of another proposed feeding centre of the small British
charity, Merlin.  Merlin has ambitions to be an operational British MSF.
Perversely, feeding centres are dangerous places for starving people: poor
sanitation makes outbreaks of diarrhoea or cholera almost inevitable, so
it makes good medical sense to open as many different centres as possible
and stop people congregating in one place.

    The OLS co-ordinators awarded Merlin the 'franchise' on Adet and, at
the beginning of this month, the Department of International Development
granted it pounds 800,000 to run the operation. WFP will supply the food.
Merlin's current annual budget is pounds 5.5 million. Its new Sudan
operation represents close to a 20 per cent increase in its turnover
overnight. Adet will also give Merlin the chance to raise its profile and
thereby raise funds directly from the public.

    Of course, the Merlin operation will save lives. But it's a further
example of how the humanitarian imperative is bound up with the
institutional interests of the organisations, big and small, which declare
themselves ready to answer that need. Where is the line when the
beneficiaries of Western aid programmes become little more than the
necessary props for a fundraising struggle at home?  Many of these
arguments have been rehearsed internally in the aid world.  The head of
OLS, Carl Tinstman, disputes that his organisation has helped create an
endless military stalemate. 'In 1988, there was no OLS, and 250,000 people
died,' he says. 'Did that nudge the parties towards a resolution of the
conflict? No, it did not. The war will go on if OLS is there or not. The
only difference would be that 100,000 people would die of starvation.'
Nick Stockton, head of emergencies at Oxfam, concedes that humanitarian
aid may have prolonged the war, but argues that this may be a necessary
condition for saving lives.  'Humanitarian aid is not going to solve the
problems of Sudan. But I do believe it will keep 'Mrs Dengue' and her son
alive, so that, possibly, her son can grow up in a Sudan where there is no
war. I would hope that, if I was in a similar situation, someone would do
the same for me and my kids.' Other aid figures, such as MSF's Huby,
believe that the impact of aid in any emergency is too negligible to make
a real difference to the overall political outcome.

    But their arguments, ultimately, are unconvincing. By the litmus test
of its own mission statement, OLS has been a total failure. It has not
stopped, or even blunted, the suffering of the people of Sudan. Two
billion dollars of aid and hundreds of thousands of aid flights have not
halted the worst famine in Sudan's history. OLS has ultimately aided not
the victims of war, but the aggressors. It has helped preserve a
tyrannical government. It has become a means of politically disengaging
from one of the world's troublespots. 'Send in the NGOs' has become the
lame battlecry of Western governments.

    So what is the alternative? To abandon hundreds and thousands of
starving people? Clearly, that would be wrong. But, perhaps - and despite
appearances to the contrary - that is, in effect, exactly what we are
doing now. Through misguided moral outrage, the war in Sudan is being
prolonged. If our goal really is the relief of the suffering of the people
of Sudan, then we should pursue a course of action that makes that goal a
practical possibility. Instead of wasting billions of dollars on aid, we
might as well be spending tens of millions of dollars on arming the
rebels, which might, at least, force the Khartoum regime to the conference
table, and so help bring the war - and thus the famine - to a conclusion.
Or else we should stop pretending that we care what happens in Sudan.

    A few days after her burial, I went back to Ayp Mo's grave. New graves
surrounded hers, but I could still see the tiny ankle bracelets on the
grave's surface, where they had been cast almost as a headstone by her
mother. On the edge of the grave was a tiny plastic blue-and-white
bracelet - a feeding tag from the MSF feeding centre. Someone had written
her name, 'Ayp Mo', in a clear, almost copybook script with the best of
intentions - as a means of saving her life. But instead, like all our good
intentions in Sudan, it became her epitaph.