Date: Fri, 23 May 2014 00:13:17 +0200
May Awakening: South Sudan famine raises memories of 1998 - By Michael
Medley
Posted on
<http://africanarguments.org/2014/05/22/may-awakening-south-sudan-famine-and
-parallels-with-1998-by-michael-medley/> May 22, 2014
Warnings of a looming famine begin early in the year, and intensify quickly.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes; many
are urban-dwellers, displaced into already-impoverished rural areas and
overcrowded relief centres. Relief agencies which for years have been
ministering to quieter hardship and more confined emergencies are wondering
whether and how to scale up their capabilities. They probably ought to be
recruiting many more staff, training and integrating them, buying extra
equipment, and loading larger quantities of relief into that frustratingly
long pipeline. But little of this can be done yet, as they still lack enough
money - or solid promises of future money - to justify the investment.
Most of the big donor states have made a preliminary contribution to the
current inter-agency humanitarian appeal, but they desire more clarity about
the situation before taking a bigger step. They realize that the recent
fighting will have disrupted many people's livelihoods, but also know that
people have various ways of coping with adversity which can absorb some of
the shock. Just how much of the shock they can absorb never seems to get
very clear.
Then there are the questions of whether the field agencies will really be
able to reach the needy people. The territory is huge, roads are dreadful
and the rainy season will make many impassible. Some donors are still
clinging to the hope that they can avoid having to pay massive costs of air
transportation. Money might have been saved if more relief supplies had been
pre-positioned by land earlier in the year. But in the worst-affected places
the situation has been too unsafe.
So the humanitarian agenda has featured for months in the growing efforts of
diplomats from IGAD and Western countries to broker agreement between the
warring parties. The diplomacy reaches a climax in early May with a visit to
the region by the Secretary-General of the United Nations. An apparent
breakthrough on humanitarian access is achieved.
It is May 1998 and it is May 2014. What happens next? Before trying to
answer this question, I will differentiate the two episodes. Although there
are remarkable parallels and echoes between the early stages of the 1998 and
(prospective) 2014 famines, the differences are important.
The unfolding of the 1998 famine
In 1998 the famine would take place mainly in greater Bahr al-Ghazal.
Certainly the disaster - then as now - was largely war-induced, but the
principal warring parties at that time were the Government of Sudan (GOS)
and the main rebel group in southern Sudan, the SPLM/A. They had been
fighting for about 15 years. In the northern part of Bahr al-Ghazal, GOS had
long sponsored various militias which mounted periodic raids on civilian as
well as military targets, killing and abducting, stealing cattle and grain,
destroying homes and crops.
Looking back from 2014 it might seem surprising that famine was not a
continual state of affairs in the mid-1990s. There was almost no infusion of
government salaries into the rural areas through soldiers, teachers and
other civil servants. Trade for the importation of extra food, agricultural
supplies and other goods was extremely limited. International aid agencies
sprinkled relief, but on a much smaller scale than was to be the case in the
post-war years. Aid mostly had to reach Bahr al-Ghazal by air. The 1998
Consolidated Appeal put the food aid target for Southern Sudan at 49,000
tonnes. (By comparison: the requirement of the World Food Programme (WFP) in
2013 was 225,000 tonnes.)
Three shocks tipped chronic deprivation onto a path which led to overt
famine. One was unusually poor weather during the growing season in 1997.
The erratic rainfall that year has been attributed an unusually strong El
Nino effect in global climate (an event which many scientists fear will
recur this year). A second factor was military. 1997 had seen a remarkable
string of success for the SPLA as, assisted by Museveni's Uganda, its major
attack force moved northwards on the west side of the Nile, capturing many
towns including Kaya, Yei, Mundri, Rumbek, Tonj, Warrap and Yirol. These
were points of external supply from which resources had diffused into the
local economy: a benefit now lost. At the same time, the increased presence
of SPLA troops in Bahr al-Ghazal meant heavier taxation of food from
villagers there. But the most important shock was a mass displacement event.
An unsuccessful rebel attempt to capture Wau resulted in as many as 100,000
people fleeing from the environs of the town into rural areas. Many from
this group would die in the famine, as would many elderly people and young
children of single mothers who under conditions of stress had become
relatively detached from the supportive relationships of kin and community.
By May 1998, displaced and desperate people had begun camping at airstrip
locations where food was known occasionally to be distributed. These places
became 'relief magnets': their reputation for food distributions attracted
the needy, the needy attracted more relief and more aid agency workers, and
the quantities of all three spiraled upwards. Aid workers were very
conscious of the dangers of this clustering: the creation of unsanitary and
overcrowded settlements where disease would spread easily, tensions become
acute with the pre-existing local community over access to land and other
resources, and concentration of supplies facilitate their taxation and other
forms of capture by local authorities and armed forces. But the dynamic
quickly became too strong to reverse.
In one way the 'relief magnet' effect was conducive to the aid effort. It
created centres of acute suffering from where journalists could conveniently
file shocking reports, belatedly pumping up public pressure for more donor
funding. In the end the 1998 Consolidated Appeal target was greatly exceeded
and more food was delivered to some locations than could usefully be
distributed. But meantime tens of thousands of people had died from
hunger-related causes.
Why didn't the relief operation get going early enough to forestall the
worst of these effects? Donors were unconvinced of the seriousness of the
threat and the feasibility of the response until too late (and the lag
between donation and relief is several months). But conviction about these
matters is not a purely rational process: it is bound up with political
commitments and ideas engrained in organizational thinking about what is
realistic and what is not. In 1998 the US - always the main source of food
aid - held back from any large donation until the end of April. I believe
this was at root due to a priority of geo-strategy.
Political background of famine relief in 1998
The US had added Sudan to its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1993,
and since 1995 had been supporting an alliance of 'frontline states' opposed
to a spread of jihadism in the region. These states - Eritrea, Ethiopia,
Uganda and also Rwanda - more or less discreetly backed the SPLM/A in its
war against the regime of President Bashir. The SPLM/A's spectacular gains
in 1997, helped by Uganda in particular, served to intensify the pressure on
Khartoum. Visits to East Africa by US State Secretary Albright in December
1997 and President Clinton himself in March 1998 sought to consolidate the
alliance to 'isolate' the Sudanese regime and, it appeared, to further
increase support for the SPLM/A and other Sudanese opposition groups with a
view to bringing about regime change.
Faced with this threat, GOS in early 1998 was seeking international support
for a ceasefire in southern Sudan. It made its appeal especially to the UN
and European states, which tended to be uncomfortable with the belligerence
of the US approach.
The question of the ceasefire was closely linked with the growing problem of
humanitarian access. Most of the aid agencies working in the rebel-held
areas did so under the auspices of a negotiated access agreement bound by
the principle of humanitarian neutrality and supervised by the UN. The
arrangement was called Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS). Under OLS, GOS
reserved the right to approve all aircraft and flight timetables.
The vast majority of relief for greater Bahr al-Ghazal had to be transported
by air. But after the attack on Wau in the first days of 1998, GOS had
imposed a flight ban in the name of security. European diplomats moved to
and fro, and the flight ban was gradually modified during the following
months, albeit hedged with bureaucratic complications. It remained an
apparent obstacle to adequate relief operations through the months of
increasing desperation until early May when UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
brokered the crucial access agreement. In effect, Khartoum used its
authority over humanitarian access as a resource in negotiations in order to
reach a ceasefire or - what was just as useful from its point of view - the
rainy season and a full-blown humanitarian crisis amid which international
toleration of further major SPLA attacks was unthinkable.
Conversely for the US, the eventual unavoidability of a major UN-based
relief operation frustrated its proxy-war strategy. After television
pictures of incipient famine began appearing in the world media (which had
happened by mid-April) a meeting of President Clinton with his National
Security Advisor and Secretaries of State and Defence made the decision to
change tack. USAID announced its first major donation to the World Food
Programme while Kofi Annan was arranging the key access agreement.
Although this real-political decision was, I believe, the main determining
factor in the timing of the relief operation, the fact was largely obscured
by indignation expressed in the media over the perceived inhumanity of
Khartoum and impotence of the UN. Attention was also diverted by debates
over the reliability of the famine warnings and - less sensibly but more
passionately - the appropriateness of using the word 'famine'. Certain aid
agency departments and staff had invested heavily in developing their
expertise as measurers of food insecurity and specialists in food aid
policy. Conscious also of the post-cold-war flourish of literature on the
unintended consequences of relief - and probably influenced too by donor
views of what constituted 'realistic' amounts of aid - some of the experts
attempted to use their intellectual prestige to belittle the early cries of
'famine!' (while agreeing that there was a looming crisis of food security).
'Not famine yet' remained the stance of UN agencies as long as two months
after the international press had begun showing pictures of emaciated
bodies. This became a spicy topic for public controversy, especially in the
UK.
Reconfiguration in 2014
By July 1998 more than a hundred people were dying malnourished on an
average day among the 18,000 or so gathered at the aid magnet location of
Ajiep. The horrors of starvation were also being experienced at many other
relief centres throughout Bahr al-Ghazal. Back to the future in May 2014 we
may wonder if we are heading so soon for scenes like this. Nobody really
knows, but nobody should be confident that we are not.
True, 2014 seems to have some significant advantages. In 1998 the people of
Bahr al-Ghazal had been living on the edge of survival in a war zone for
years. Many were down to a minimal level of household assets and bodily
strength even before the shocks of 1997 and the Wau exodus. Before December
2013, on the other hand, South Sudan had been largely at peace for a decade.
Even the parts of Jonglei worst affected by regional conflict still felt
benefit from networks of trade and salary-remittance. However, the matter of
people's resilience is doubtless not as simple as this. It may be that
people who have become used to a peacetime lifestyle find it harder to
manage during the return of wartime conditions.
Then again, 2014 has in place a stronger network of humanitarian agencies,
notably including UNMISS, the UN peacekeeping force. The camps protected by
UNMISS have already saved thousands from violent death. But as the
experiences of 1998 and many other disasters remind us, camps will turn into
hells. In some places they have already done so: scenes of dire food
shortage, conflict between groups within them and with local communities
outside, appalling sanitary conditions and now an outbreak of cholera. Worse
is likely to come as their numbers swell. It is illusory to think that even
with the help of UNMISS anyone will be able to run them tidily.
As in 1998 the agencies hope to reduce the clustering of desperate
populations by arranging quick singular relief distributions in remote
areas. Compared with the war years, the road network provides a more
realistic option for transporting relief, but it is nevertheless highly
treacherous in the rainy season even on major routes. In 2014 the
most-affected states are more readily reached by barge transport than they
were when the epicentre of disaster was in Bahr al-Ghazal. But road and
barge are mainly useful for transporting supplies to the major centres. They
cannot reach the majority of villages, especially not if insecurity remains
a problem. Widespread air-dropping will have to be used for that.
The success of relief distributions, especially in remote areas, will be
sensitive to the attitudes of local leaders and military units. 1998
suggests that it will often be delusory and counter-productive to target
exclusively the 'most vulnerable' within communities. If such distributions
take place, the goods are likely to be forcibly re-distributed afterwards.
Many of those who died in 1998 were people who lacked the right family or
clan relationships within the informal distribution systems. Relief agencies
must try to understand who these people are, and help them with special
measures, but within the context of broader distributions. It is not easy to
do. Meanwhile, unless some alternative way is found of paying and feeding
SPLM/A-IO, White Army, and other rebel fighters, they will almost inevitably
take much of the relief in their areas. Perhaps some units of the
government's SPLA will do the same.
This thought leads to reflection on the difficult relationship between the
relief operation and both the peace process and the agenda of bringing war
criminals to account for their crimes. The relief operation must adopt the
ideals of neutrality but will not be neutral in effect. Even if UNMISS were
fully funded and given a strong mandate to protect relief, the aid agencies
would still often rely on labour and systems owned by local oligarchs and
security conditions determined by nearby fighters. Maintaining the
cooperation of these actors is likely to depend continuously on their
attitudes to the higher political process and the tactics of the top leaders
at the negotiating tables. The existence of the relief operation increases
the pressure on the international community to ensure that the SPLM-IO is
treated as a legitimate party in the talks, and it is hostage (in some sense
at least) to war criminals who may feel under threat.
The side-effects of the humanitarian imperative understandably create doubts
about the whole enterprise in both donor and recipient countries. My
impression is that public attitudes have gained in maturity over the last 16
years, by familiarity with many hard examples. The shock when the gulf is
revealed between the ideals and the practicalities of relief in complex
emergencies is now less frequently one of mere indignation or despair. Some
may reasonably argue that the big famine intervention is a pattern in global
power that we should resist. But I for one will welcome a large increase in
relief funding following the Oslo donor conference on 20th May. On the model
of 1998 I then expect an agonizingly slow gear-up of agency operations
followed by a frenzy in which they are falling over each other, patently
failing to help many thousands of people, and yet helping some.
It should have started earlier. The rainy season is now upon us. The donors
have supplied less than half of what the field agencies requested for the
first six months of the year. They - and we - should have thought harder
about the risks. Our imaginations have perhaps been too full with the
political and military manoeuvres, and with our outrage at the perpetrators
of unspeakable cruelties. The mind's eye should have followed more intently
all the people who had left their homes.
Michael Medley is editor of <http://www.southsudancivics.info/>
SouthSudanCivics.info. Much of the above article is based on his doctoral
thesis, Humanitarian parsimony in Sudan: The Bahr al-Ghazal famine of 1998
(University of Bristol, 2010), which can be accessed in full
<http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.52985> here.
<http://africanarguments.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/SouthSudan1998-e1400
754366784.jpg> First Phase Digital
Displaced South Sudanese during the famine in 1998 (UN photo library).
(image/jpeg attachment: image001.jpg)