Fighting Famine in North Africa
SAMUELS, GERTRUDE
5 MILLION IN DANGER Fighting Famine in North Africa BY GERTRUDE SAMUELS United Nations The worst famine since the dreadful scourge of 1984-85, United Nations field experts say, could ravage...
...now, with resumption of relations between Ethiopia and Israel, a spokesman for the Israeli Mission to the UN reports that "the matter is sensitive and acute, but Ethiopia has agreed basically to the reunification with families in Israel...
...But during an interview at the United Nations, Yilma Kassaye, Ethiopia's Commissioner of Relief and Rehabilitation, insisted that responsibility for the present predicament rests with the rebels for having engaged in "piracy acts...
...The territorial integrity of the government has been violated...
...Technically, the problem "can be solved," said one UN disaster expert, "not only in Sudan and Ethiopia, but also in Mozambique and Angola, and even in Liberia...
...5 MILLION IN DANGER Fighting Famine in North Africa BY GERTRUDE SAMUELS United Nations The worst famine since the dreadful scourge of 1984-85, United Nations field experts say, could ravage huge populations in northern Ethiopia and the Sudan within the next three months...
...But access to the affected people is being thwarted by regional rebellions and military conflicts in the two countries...
...We have gone from a pluralistic democratic system to being governed by the military...
...Writing in the April issue of Current History, John O. Voll, chairman of the History Department at the University of New Hampshire and an expert on Islam and the Sudan, warns: "The situation...
...so people must travel long distances on their feet, and they're naked and starved to death on the way...
...Last July Brian Wannop, a special representative of the Secretary-General, was among those lined up on a train to be shot...
...My government is concerned that the donors did not respond to our appeal for airlifting operations," he said...
...Then she added, emotionally: "If we do not succeed, it will at least be clear to the world that we have left no stone unturned in our effort to prevent death through starvation, and this at a time when not a single person need have died...
...The picture is further complicated by the flood of refugees crossing borders to escape both the fighting and starvation: Thousands have been pouring into Sudan from war-torn surrounding states, including Ethiopia, while uprooted Sudanese and Somalis have been crossing into Ethiopia...
...At this stage a key requirement, say UN officials, is "forward planning...
...A primary need is the foodstocks...
...But we know that if we are not able to launch relief there, millions will starve all over again...
...The frustrated donor governments— the United States, Canada, the 12 European Community countries, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland—have appealed to both sides for at least a ceasefire at Massawa to allow life-saving cargo to get through...
...The top priority, UN relief experts argue, must be to assure that the help gets to them before death does...
...The Marxist government of Ethiopia has lost control of Eritrea and Tigré, where the Liberation Front has the aim of independence...
...It's been a war zone for the past two years...
...The soft-spoken 60-year-old diplomat was forthright in appraising his country's plight: "What is happening in Sudan is the result of 30 years of civil strife—political, ethnic, religious strife between the north and the south...
...People are starving in small numbers...
...Gertrude Samuels reports regularly on the United Nations for this magazine...
...In his office on the 29th floor of the Secretariat Building Phillippe L. Boullé, the 47-year-old French diplomat and economist who is a longtime adviser to Perez de Cuéllar on relief matters, told me: "The tragic situation we have now is that there should be no problem with bringing food where it's needed...
...Late spring rains promise to postpone the danger of starvation, but they cannot possibly make up for the enormous existing shortages—particularly of such items as wheat, maize, sorghum, and milk powder...
...Chartered planes will probably be used to carry out this rescue effort...
...but the constraints in all these places are complicated by bandits who raid the trucks and fire on the drivers and volunteers...
...The political dimension of the problem cannot be denied...
...and increasing numbers will be killed in the fighting...
...Referring to a report just received from his Unit For Special Emergency Programs in Ethiopia, the SecretaryGeneral stressed that the next several months are a crucial period...
...Speaking on behalf of the contributing nations at a press conference here April 24, Monique Landry, Canada's Minister of External Relations, said: "The overall food deficit is about 700,000 tons...
...If the parties concerned cannot find some way to deliver the major part of this deficit, surely many people will die of starvation before the year is out...
...As I got up to leave, he said rather sadly: "The Sudanese people liked the democracy that they had...
...Pundits like to point out that if there were no long-running civil wars in North Africa, fighting the region's recurrent droughts would be far less difficult...
...Living among those civilians are more than 10,000 Jews, chiefly in Addis Ababa...
...is one of multiple, interacting crises...
...If this war does not stop, the Sudan will continue to deteriorate in every way...
...They enjoyed it, you know...
...This time there is no shortage of donor nations mobilized and eager to contribute the vital foodstocks, medical assistance, trucks, and volunteers that would avert a repetition of the tragedy six years ago in the drought-stricken areas...
...Relief can't reach thecivilians...
...What's essential now is to bring an end to the conflict...
...In the 1984 "Operation Moses," Israel, with United States help, airlifted over 7,000 Ethiopian Jews to Tel Aviv...
...They burned ships carrying food, and staged a war in Massawa," he said with quiet contempt...
...The Secretary-General has himself long been asking the combatants to call off the war at Massawa...
...But more important, they need to sit down and get help for themselves—agricultural tools, health services—and to bring an end to the ongoing civil war...
...The present government is only a year old...
...I discussed this with Ambassador Amin M.Abdoun at the Sudan Mission to the UN...
...Ethiopia is not to be blamed...
...Ambassador Abdoun is retiring and will be back home soon...
...The combined figure for all drought-stricken areas is believed to be close to 5 million...
...A caring community of donor nations is ready to provide emergency help to those facing famine...
...he was spared only after negotiations by Sudanese officials...
...At least 45,000 tons of food must be delivered each month, and shipments of that size "pose considerable logistics problems, given the condition of roads, the terrain, and the security situation in the contested areas...
...Some 2 million Sudanese are at risk, especially in the central and southern provinces, plus nearly 1 million refugees who fled to Sudan from Ethiopia, Chad, Uganda and Zaire to escape the trouble in their own countries...
...The prospect is that thousands may die as a result of famine intensified by the continuing civil war...
...That does not alter the fact, however, that today almost 5 million innocent people—many of them, indeed, children—are caught in the web of the power battles...
...UN officials familiar with earlier disasters in the same region seem to echo one another with a desperate refrain: "What we're trying to do is to avoid the 1984-85 famine...
...But how to do it without being shot at, or having the trucks damaged...
...United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuéìlar has pointed out that conservative estimates put the number of people endangered in northern Ethiopia alone at 2.3 million, chieflyin the provinces of Eritrea and Tigr...
...As a result, thousands of tons of food and medicines actually have been destroyed, and it is extremely dangerous, not to mention seemingly futile, to bring in more...
...When I noted that the issue at the moment was ho w f oodstocks could be gotten to the starving civilians, he again focused on defending the faltering regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam...
...The Ethiopian Air Force has been bombing rebels at the Red Sea port of Massawa, the main entry point for supplies...
...Like Ethiopia, neighboring Sudan—where a military coup overthrew the civilian government in June 1989—has been chronically afflicted by drought and internal war...
Vol. 73 • April 1990 • No. 7
