Who is getting 'aid' in southern Sudan?
Executive Intelligence Review, July 24, 1998,
pp. 51-52
Linda de Hoyos
The famine afflicting the people of southern Sudan, particularly the states of Bahr el-Ghazal, has become so acute that John Garang, chairman of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), declared on July 16 that he would agree to a cease-fire in order to permit humanitarian aid to reach its destination.
The worst famine is in areas under Garang's control, where the war has forced hundreds of thousands to leave their homes and crops, and where in a weakened physical condition, they are in no shape to begin cultivation in their temporary shelters, even when conditions permit.
The plight of civilians has also been worsened by the siphoning off of funds originally designated for aid to non-combatants, which has now been exposed as landing in the hands of the SPLA troops, according to a report issued in late May by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.
As recounted in the accompanying EIR interview with Dr. Riak Machar, President of the Coordinating Council for the Southern States of Sudan, the Coordinating Council, which functions as the government in southern Sudan, had sounded the alarm of an impending famine in January, caused by both irregularity in rainfall and by the continued fighting by Garang and then Kerubino Bol in the region. The response from the international community was desultory. Even when in March, the international aid agencies comprising the Operation Lifeline Sudan run by the United Nations, began their operations, they denied that they had the cooperation of the government, and the famine--exacerbated by the antics of the secessionist rebels in the South--was blamed on the government. The government of Sudan had asked the international community to bring food down to the South in barges, this before the rainy season began blocking road access, or, now, to use the El-Obeid City airport from Sudan. However, Operation Lifeline Sudan insists that it will operate from an airport farther from the delivery site, using the facilities at Lokichokio, Kenya. This is to ensure that Sudan has no capability to monitor the contents of the airlift to Bahr el-Ghazal.
Even with Sudan's accession to open the South to Operation Lifeline from Lokichokio, the actual amount of food brought in has been paltry--given that there are only six planes operating from there at any one time, and that one of them, according to the London {Guardian} of July 1, is an ``ex-RAF transport plane that used to belong to the Queen's flight. Before its clandestine relief operations, the Hawker Siddeley 748 used to ferry the royal corgis around.''
The amount of food delivered in June then, was 3,471 metric tons, as opposed to the 9,574 metric tons believed by the World Food Program to be required to feed the estimated 1.2 million people at grave risk. Through April of next year, the World Food Program report of June 24 currently projects a shortfall of 66,969 metric tons, against minimal requirements.
It is no exaggeration, then, that prolongation of the war at the very least will lead to the death by starvation of many thousands. While the media in the West blame the Sudan government for this tragedy, it is the Sudan government that proposed a cease-fire to John Garang last May in talks in Nairobi, and it is the Sudan government that has made the concession for self-determination for the South through a supervised referendum. However, up to this point, the recalcitrance of Garang--backed by the war party of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice and John Prendergast of the U.S. National Security Council, along with Caroline Cox, a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords--has kept the war going.
For years, the Sudan government has charged that the Operation Lifeline Sudan was using the cover of ``humanitarian aid'' to, in fact, give military aid to the SPLA and its allies, in violation of such agencies' mandate. In 1997, a plane of the International Red Cross, for instance, was caught ferrying SPLA guerrillas.
The Norwegian Foreign Ministry has strongly confirmed Sudan's charges, with a report issued from the ministry, that the Norwegian Peoples Aid ``misused emergency aid money and actively kept the civil war going on by supporting the SPLA guerrillas,'' according to the Oslo daily {Aftenposten} on May 20. The Norwegian Foreign Ministry's denunciation of the aid agency--through which the Norwegian government channels its funding for aid to Sudan and other locations--was the result of a study of Peoples Aid's work carried out by the Danish consultant agency COWI.
Norwegian Peoples Aid works closely with the U.S. Committee on Refugees of Roger Winter, one of the loudest voices in the Washington ``war party'' against Sudan. As reported by {Aftenposten,} Norwegian Peoples Aid ``has provided food for the rebels, made cars and houses available and organized schools for children of SPLA officers.'' The organization is accused of giving medical help to wounded soldiers at the front rather than helping civilians. The COWI report states: ``To establish a field hospital close to the front is something you do when your main concern is military progress.'' COWI further accusesPeoples Aid of ``having supplied transport and communication to the SPLA and having allowed the SPLA to sell emergency aid equipment in order to get the money for the purchase of guns and ammunition,'' reports the Danish paper {Aktuelt.} The aid agency's close links to the SPLA ``make control and efficient supervision very problematic,'' said COWI.
The report has been denied by Peoples Aid. However, its chief of information, Ivar Christiansen, declared: ``We have never been neutral in the conflict of South Sudan; we openly support the SPLA.''