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 enables the combatants to carry on 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 metres 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 way station on the road to hell – the epicentre of a famine that is now ravaging southern Sudan. Ayp had died in a Mdecins Sans Frontires (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 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 planes have dropped from the skies. Or the all- so-familiar blonde 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 in Britain by the Disasters Emergency Committee on behalf of the top 12 British agencies that raised more than $13-million in three weeks. The message was simple: give money and save starving children such as Ayp Mo.
When Clare Short, Britain’s 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. 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 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 real one that has been painfully learned, though not necessarily addressed, in 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 Bosnian 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?”
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 United Nations Children’s Fund (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. 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 10Eyears 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.
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 go on.”
In 1989, following a previous famine caused by war, in which hundreds of thousands perished, 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.
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 ton of the WFP airborne maize – $1 750, or 10 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.
OLS, because it is a UN bureaucracy, 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 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 yet 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 Sudan People’s Liberation Army 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 Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA), the rebels’ so-called ”humanitarian” wing. Despite their charitable work, the 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.
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.
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, 40km 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. They are substantial bureaucracies, with buildings, permanent staff and big PR departments to maintain. 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 $3- million in three weeks. MSF, which has the largest operation in Sudan, received less than 2% of the $13-million that was pledged, and is now engaged in a fundraising operation, using television advertisements as part of its campaign.
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”.
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.”
But 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. The $2-billion spent has ultimately aided not the victims of war, but the aggressors. It has helped preserve a tyrannical government.
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. If our goal really is the relief of the suffering of the people of Sudan, then 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.