Nothing to eat
Richard Kershaw
One was conscious of movement before one could really see anything. Like a moonless farmyard full of the presence of animals, the bush was pitch-black but alive. Then as we stumbled along with a torch held by a black UN official from Geneva, there they were: a silent, inter- minable line of human beings, in single file, standing on the path from the Ethio- Pian frontier ten miles away. They waited, over 2,000 of them, a complete village from the highlands of Tigre, at the edge of the refugee camp. They said that they had come because there was nothing left to eat back home; drought had become famine; and their own Tigrean relief organisation had gathered and organised them to walk down off the highlands to the hot plains of eastern Sudan. They had been fed by their own organisers on the way, as they walked for a month. Now they had arrived — carefully, by dark, the most impracticable time to do so, but deliberately because, one suspects, there is a deep trepidation in the mind of even the best-ordered refugee. At the front of the line where they had stopped just outside the camp, a village leader had lists of names. Everyone from the village was accounted for; the old and the sick were helped or even carried on branch litters; exhausted grandfathers queued with wide-eyed infants. Otherwise they had brought almost nothing with tnem.
It was the most savagely direct experi- ence for an outsider of what it means to be a refugee. By a remarkable act of manage- Ment 2,000 vulnerable people had been Moved through hostile country for four Weeks on foot. Now, with exhausted pas- sivity, they waited for what they had come for: food, water, shelter. What nobody dared to tell them that night was that there was nothing for them; water they might get the next day by scraping it from seepage holes in the near-by river bed. But there were no suPplies in camp. As for food, the last bags of grain had been distributed that day. No neW supplies had arrived, and no one knew len any were expected. As the man from the UNHCR Emergency Unit in Geneva walked among the new arrivals, he (even be) could only go on repeating, `Oh my Gbdr These people had fled to no pur- Pose. Five kilometres back, they told us, was another village. And behind that another Move, hundred thousand people on the As we congratulate ourselves — that seems to me to be what everyone is doing on our rapid and generous response to the Ethiopian crisis, and to Mr Geldof with his record, and to appeals from the volun- tary agencies, we really ought to recognise that we have nothing to congratulate ourselves about at all. In brief, it is a much wider crisis than that of Ethiopia which should concern us. There is the most monstrous event going on right across Africa — a famine. And we have reacted to it only when the right television pictures caught our attention at the right time. And that reaction has been, by definition, too late. From West Africa, through Chad, Western and Eastern Sudan, to the Ethio- pian highlands, there is starvation follow- ing rain and crop failures. This had been predicted and talked about by agencies and governments in plenty of time to have saved countless thousands of lives which are at this moment slipping away.
To come back to the camp — Wad Kauli on the banks of the Atbara River, which has itself ceased to flow in the drought — it had only been in existence for three and a half weeks on the night I arrived. Tigreans and Eritreans have been arriving in the Sudan at a rate of over 3,000 a day. The camps around the main town of Dassala were jam-packed so new arrivals were officially encouraged to turn up further south, which dutifully they did. In those three weeks, well over 60,000 souls had arrived at Wad Kauli.
Now the word `camp' encourages images of tents and collective help and bonhomie. Wad Kauli has none of that. The site was chosen chiefly because there were still standing pools of water in the nearby riverbed. While I was there, a furious argument developed between an Oxfam specialist and a visiting State Department team which wished to pump the standing water into the camp — thereby, as the Oxfam expert insisted, probably exhaust- ing supplies well before the next rains, which will not come before May, if at all. And when they do, incidentally, this camp will be cut off from outside supplies as the roads become quagmires and the river a broad torrent. So thousands of tons of food will have to be stockpiled in coming weeks. Meanwhile, there is no food to eat now.
Can you conceive of what it is like to have no food at all? In a world of Tesco and Sainsbury and Mr Patel-who-is-open- late-round-the-corner, the suspicion must be that no food means someone has been .dreadfully inefficient, or criminally cor- rupt.
The reason there is no food in Wad Kauli is three-fold, and quite different. First, this god-forsaken finger of bush has only just become a `camp', and its popula- tion (which will soon be over 100,000) lives under thornbushes and grass mats with no access to a local society whose language they do not speak. Second, the Sudan itself has had its worst-ever crop failure. This area in a good year is a major grain exporter. The recent November harvest was only ten per cent of normal. And the Sudan itself now has a major famine of its own — with over three million people already on the move in desperation; people who have abandoned homes, the chance of next year's harvest, and their wealth in the form of animals (if these are not already dead)..
Neither of those two reasons can we do anything about. But the third we could. Crisis management of this sort is really a matter of the speed and relevance of response. The Sudanese shortfall this year of nearly two million tons of grain to feed itself has been known for quite long enough for it to have been met by the outside world. So has the presence now in that country, which generously still main- tains an `open door' policy to all its neighbours, of over one million refugees who also need feeding.
So far the EEC's grain mountain prom- ises only 75,000 tons. To its great credit, the United States has pledged three- quarters of a million tons this year. But pledges do not fill bellies — ships have to dock, harbours have to unload them at unprecedented speed, and then trucks are needed, together with good management, to get supplies to where they will be consumed before it is too late. This is not happening.
Except for some latter-day Malthusian freak, Wad Kauli is a mad place. In it — like a team from MASH — a random group of voluntary aid workers tries to impose an element of sanity. One of them was doing a child survey, and found a major statistical shortfall of children uiider three; then it struck him why — they were already dead. Sitting with our tins of sardines and instant soup surrounded by the sound of 60,000 starving people, we found that thought hard to bear.
Richard Kershaw was in the Sudan reporting for BBC television.
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