The Real Faces Of Famine

In Somalia, relief agencies fed the fighters, rented cars and houses from warlords and hired idle militiamen as bodyguards. It fed the fighting. No wonder Somalia's warlords are trying to get the aid groups to come back. For belligerents in these African wars, aid and relief are business. They try to lure relief agencies just as a small-town chamber of commerce might attract corporate investment.

I've spent hundreds of nights with relief workers in Sudan, Somalia and Zaire and watched them wrestle with these dilemmas over the years. After spending their days delivering food and supplies, they often sit and lament how saving one group of children can mean arming other children. Yet how is it possible to stand by when there is even a small chance that food can save the wide-eyed, swollen-bellied children they see every day? Aid workers never crack the conundrum. They go back home to Europe and America and let newer, younger aid workers wrestle with the same problems. Meanwhile, the executives who run these charities reinforce the notion that fighting famine means pouring money and food into the battle zone.

Hunger is political, and fighting it requires moral commitment on a higher level than writing a check or going out and buying the latest CD to raise money for charity.

The problem of commitment starts with our images of hunger. The face of famine in Sudan should not be that of a starving child. It should be the faces of the country's leaders, rebel leader John Garang and President Omar al-Bashir. And it should be the faces of the men in Washington and Tehran who have backed opposite sides in the SPLA's fight against the Islamic fundamentalist government in Khartoum. The faces of famine should not inspire pity, they should inspire anger and indignation at men whose personal and political priorities have led to the starvation deaths of more than a million people in the last 15 years in Sudan alone. And if these are the faces of famine, perhaps our first reaction should not be to reach for a checkbook, but to take to the streets or at least phone our political leaders.

MAREN is the author of ''The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity'' (Free Press, 1997).

© 1998