A Deadly New Year

The wrinkled old Tuareg looked out across the windblown desert surrounding the squalid refugee camp near the Niger capital of Niamey, where he and 5,000 others now live. "This year," he said it was the animals that died. Most of us managed to survive. But next year, unless Allah is most merciful, it will be our turn to die."

Sadly, there is very little likelihood that Allah will be any more merciful next year than he has been throughout 1973. Mohammed Ibrahim may be alive, but starvation and disease on the three-month trek from drought-ravaged Mali to Niger cost him all his cattle and camels and a third of his family. Now he is destitute, living in a stark hut made oi hides The Niger Red Cross manages to provide him with 150 grams of food per day, which, according to U.N. officials, can only sustain life for a short time.

Despite massive international relict efforts the worst drought in recorded African history has thus far claimed perhaps as many as 100,000 lives in northern Nigeria and in the "Sahel," or subSaharan, nations of Mauritania, Senegal Mali, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad. More than 1,000,000 hungry nomads are roaming the Sahel, surrounding its cities in a futile search for food. Nomads in Chad have been forced to eat leaves and bark to stay alive. In Nigerias parched Northeast, villagers pillage anthills to get at grain kernels that the ants have stored away.

The drought area stretches across the entire waist of Africa, from Mauritania in the west to Ethiopia in the east In Ethiopia, more than 50,000 have died of starvation. Many mothers have had to sacrifice their weakest children by drawing emergency food rations for them and then using the food to feed the others. So great is the catastrophe, says one local priest, that the traditional public weeping and wailing for the dead has been abandoned; the people have lost the will to cry.

Ethiopia's case is the saddest ot all because many of the deaths could have been avoided. Last January, when officials brought word of imminent starvation among peasants to one provincial governor, he disciplined them for their "negative attitude." He also refused to press Addis Ababa for aid, for fear of embarrassing a government that was pushing tourism. The result was widespread starvation and an initial reluctance on the part of international agencies to send food; U.N. officials assumed that Ethiopia was suffering far less than the Sahel states.

Swollen Stomachs. The prognosis for Ethiopia and the sub-Saharan countries is for an equally grim and dry new year. The little rain that did fall this year came late and ended early, preventing a full fall harvest of millet and sorghum that might have saved some lives Relief efforts are continuing, and in Ethiopia some food is belatedly getting to the impoverished northern provinces But in the refugee camps thousands of children with matchstick legs, protruding ribs and swollen stomachs continue to die of malnutrition. A new woe was added last week when swarms of locusts began eating their way through much of Chad and northern Nigeria, reducing the meager supply of food still further.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.