Sudan Starvation in a Fruitful Land

By JAMES WILDE JUBA

There is, cruelly, food to be had. The land is fertile, the rains were good, and this year's harvest will be the best in a decade. But 4 million people are starving because of a civil war that Sudan has inflicted upon itself. Standing between the food and the people are 58,000 government troops and 30,000 rebels of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. On both sides the terrible weapon is increasingly food, not bullets.

More than a million people have already died in the conflict between the predominantly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south. Now some 250,000 are wasting away in Juba, the besieged southern capital, which has been virtually shut off from outside relief since September. Aweil, 600 miles southwest of Khartoum, got its last food train eight months ago; 8,000 exhausted people perished there during the summer. How many more have gone, no one knows.

Thousands on thousands of southern Sudanese are wandering helplessly through the vast bushland, leaving a trail of bones as they flee into overcrowded and starving towns, abandoning their blooming crops. They are driven to places like Juba by the two armies. The government denies the civilians food to keep it out of the hands of S.P.L.A. fighters. The S.P.L.A. rapes civilian women, steals civilians' food and mines their fields. Its aim is to cause chaos in the towns by flooding them with desperate refugees. "The government in Khartoum has turned its back on the south. The S.P.L.A. forces everyone to flee," says Major General Peter Cirillo, former governor of Equatoria province. "Both sides use food as a weapon."

Juba is a city of wanderers roaming hopelessly through muddy streets in a desperate search for food. Silent women with empty plastic buckets throng the 2-acre Konyo-Konyo Market, scavenging through its hundreds of barren wooden stalls. Only weeds, leaves and lily pods are for sale, at 50 cents a miserable bunch. Even the richest cannot find food here. A civil servant like Michael Apollo eats only one bowl of boiled weeds a day and sends his family to beg at emergency feeding centers. Everywhere people thrust themselves forward, baring their bony chests and screaming, "Look how hungry I am!"

The 24-year-old civil war is an ethnic, economic and religious struggle between the north, home to 75% of the population, most of the wealth and all of the national government, and the south, which resents at once the north's control and its neglect. The S.P.L.A., dominated by Dinka tribesmen, demands repeal of Shari'a, or Islamic law, and establishment of provincial parliaments. But the plight of the largely Christian and animist tribesmen in the south has worsened dramatically since January, when the S.P.L.A. launched an offensive, capturing the strategic crossroads town of Kapoeta and about a dozen smaller towns. In the months since, the S.P.L.A. has managed to tighten a stranglehold on all the southern government-held garrisons.

When the S.P.L.A. overruns a village, it collects all the food and clothing and sends residents into the bush. Then the rebels mine the fields, the houses and the surrounding footpaths so no one can return. The S.P.L.A. even drove displaced people from squalid camps near Juba, forcing them to abandon their crops a second time. The S.P.L.A. reaped the harvest. George Tombe, 32, is a chieftain of Kabo, a village 9 miles west of Juba. The S.P.L.A. stormed Kabo and beat him. "They took everything," he whispers, including the crops. "The harvest was good this year. Now I wait for death."

Last month the government recaptured Kabo. Its troops burned the village to the ground. U.S. congressional staffers who visited Sudan returned convinced that the government of Prime Minister Sadiq el Mahdi bears at least equal responsibility for the starvation. Declared one: "The conduct of the government borders on criminal neglect and a de facto policy of exterminating the southerners."

Little emergency food is reaching the afflicted. Khartoum supplies its troops at Juba with three food-and-arms flights a day. But not one sack of maize goes to civilians. Northern traders collude with the army to hoard food, then sell it at skyrocketing prices. Last month Prime Minister Sadiq ordered a UNICEF representative to cease shipments of food and medicine to the south. "You are feeding the people who kill my soldiers," he said coldly.

Relief organizations have been struggling to fill the gap, but with limited success and under considerable danger. Miami-based Southern Air Transport is under contract to the U.N. to fly in maize from Uganda. The S.P.L.A. has vowed to shoot relief planes out of the sky. In October the first planeload of maize actually made it into Juba. Crewmen aboard the C-130 cargo plane peered anxiously through an open escape hatch as their aircraft corkscrewed down to the airstrip, on the lookout for rebel rockets. But even such daring trips cannot begin to save the town from starvation. "This amount of food will feed only a fraction of those in need," said Gordon Wagner, the U.S. representative of OXFAM in Juba. He had not eaten in four days. Children scream in agony at the 50 feeding centers in the town. "I fed 900 children," said Daniel Bulla, a Dinka, the emaciated supervisor. "Tomorrow thousands will come, and we will have nothing to give them."

International donors are slowly awakening to Sudan's plight. Norwegian People's Aid says it can get more than 1,000 tons of maize a month into the rebel-held south. World Vision, a private U.S. group, will send two shipments of food and medicine to the south. The World Food Program has started a limited airlift of a few thousand tons. But these donations provide only minimal relief.

The U.S. gave Sudan $16 million in emergency relief this year, including 32,000 tons of food. But only half has actually been delivered. Western governments have been reluctant to exert on the Sudanese government the kind of concerted pressure they applied to neighboring Ethiopia when the Marxist regime there was hindering famine relief in another civil war. They fear criticism would strain their fragile ties to a government strategically placed between Ethiopia and Libya and only strengthen the hand of the fundamentalist National Islamic Front, an important power in the Khartoum coalition.

What Sudan's ravaged civilians need is peace. A glimmer emerged two weeks ago when S.P.L.A. leader Colonel John Garang signed a blueprint for a cease- fire with the Democratic Unionist Party, the second largest partner in the government. National Islamic Front militants oppose the plan, but Sadiq's coalition-leading Umma Party approved the pact late last week.

Few in Sudan believe the grim condition of the south can be relieved without much greater foreign pressure. Washington is finally giving a nudge to Khartoum: the U.S. is reportedly offering Sudan a major restructuring of its foreign debt and 200,000 tons of food if it adopts the cease-fire. A special delegation of foreign-aid agencies is planning to meet soon with the S.P.L.A.'s Garang to plead with him to allow food shipments to both sides. Khartoum is also under U.N. pressure to allow the free flow of food to the hungry. But southerners like Major General Cirillo believe nothing less than an all-out campaign by the West can work. Says Cirillo: "Why doesn't the world listen to us and make both Khartoum and the S.P.L.A. sit down and talk? There must be peace."

None of that may be enough for Juba. The city is dying, slowly and inexorably. Or for Torit, where starving Muslim and Christian communities have only prayers for salvation. Or for wafer-thin Sebit Lemoro, 30, a biology teacher with 13 dependents and a 1/2 lb. of maize flour. "We know the end is coming," he barely quavers. "If you are here next month, I may well be dead."

With reporting by Lewis Smith/Washington