The Real Faces Of Famine

HERE WE GO AGAIN. SKELETAL, STARVING AFRICANS are back in the news, this time from Sudan. If you are moved--and you'd have to be heartless not to be--operators are standing by to take your check or credit-card number. If you have any doubts that your contribution will really help, the charities will assure you that food will reach these victims quickly and save their lives, at least until the next famine. It's that simple. Defeating hunger means getting food to this emaciated man, to his family, to his children. That requires money, your money. Now you can turn the page or change the channel with the warm feeling that you've done what you can to fight hunger.

I, too, feel like reaching for my checkbook when I see the photographs. But I know better. After spending nearly 20 years in Africa as an aid worker and journalist, I know that fighting hunger is anything but simple. And I've learned that any donation I might make may in fact insure that next year I will open this magazine and see fresh photographs of hunger.

Sudanese are not starving because crops failed or because a flood wiped out roads. And they're not starving because they lack Western technology and farming skills. They're starving because starvation is a weapon in Sudan's 15-year-old civil war. The government in Khartoum has been battling rebels of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in southern Sudan, and the SPLA has been feuding with its own breakaway factions. Both the government and the rebels have choked off villages, stolen cattle and burned and looted crops. As a result, people have been living on relief food supplied by a consortium of U.N. agencies and relief groups known as Operation Lifeline Sudan.

Operation Lifeline Sudan relies on the good will of these groups to deliver its food. Last week the SPLA announced unilaterally that it would allow food into famine areas of Bahr-al-Ghazal province in the south. But what this means is that the SPLA in effect controls the food spigot. People are fed at their, or the government's, whim. And the people know it. Relief food is the flip side of starvation, the carrot and the stick. Both are weapons of war, nothing more than means to an end for men whose only passion is power and control.

It has been a hard-learned lesson in the relief industry that resources accrue to the powerful. While Westerners see bags of food as weapons in a war against hunger, belligerents in Africa see the food as a resource for fighting their own wars. Their motives for allowing relief food into a battle zone are rarely humanitarian. Their only concerns are strategic. Food goes into the bellies of the militias and is sold to purchase weapons and ammunition. When relief food lands in a war, it is the soldiers who are fed first. So the primary beneficiaries of charity are the people who caused the problem to begin with. They are thus energized to continue fighting and marauding and creating new scenes of starvation that will show up in newspapers and magazines and in ads for relief agencies trying to raise more money to send more food into the battle.

It's now an old story in Africa. In the refugee camps that sprouted up in Zaire after the Rwanda genocide, masses of relief food were commandeered by the very same leaders who planned the massacres of some 800,000 people. These leaders ran the refugee camps, controlled food distribution, sold as much as they could, rearmed themselves and began mounting an insurgency.