The

Challenges

of Famine Relief

Emergency Operations

in the Sudan

Francis M. Deng and Larry Minear

THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

Washington, D.C.

Contents

Preface by Maurice Strong

Maps

Glossary

Introduction

1. Famine: Causes and Responses

The Geographic Context

The Demographic Context

The Political Context

Poverty and Underdevelopment

Official Attitudes

Emerging Global Perspectives

The Challenges

2. Drought-Induced Famine, 1983-86

Genesis of the Emergency

Intervening from Outside

Framing the Context

Coordinating Activities

Evaluating the Results

3. Conflict-Related Famine, 1987-9l

Overview of Operation Lifeline Sudan

Intervening from Outside

Framing the Context

Coordinating Activities

Evaluating the Results

4. A Look to the Future

The Generic Problems in Perspective

New Horizons on Humanitarian Imperatives

Needed Institutional Reforms

Relief and the Prospects for Peace

Concluding Reflections

Appendix A: Persons Consulted for Office of Emergency

Appendix B: Persons Consulted for Operation Lifeline Sudan Study

Appendix C: Contributing Agencies

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Introduction

With the collapse of ideologies, alliance systems, and governmental structures that divided much of the world for forty years, the international community has acquired both the opportunity for and the burden of creating better arrangements. Traditional objectives of security and economic prosperity can, in principle, be approached in more cooperative ways. Consensus for human rights and human needs can, in principle, be pursued beyond the level of political rhetoric.

The severe economic austerity that has become endemic in many parts of the world makes these aspirations both urgent and difficult. Throughout Eastern Europe and the new states succeeding the Soviet Union, an attempt is under way to create consensual forms of government and market economies at the same time. This effort, requiring a social transformation of unprecedented magnitude, does not as yet command plausibly adequate resources. Economic output in the former communist states is declining from a base that was already too meager to sustain a modern society. That problem is shared, moreover, in many parts of the world with very different political histories.

This situation imposes large demands for the international transfer of resources to mitigate uneven economic development and occasionally to respond to overriding humanitarian concerns. As an international economy slowly forms, so also does a consciousness of international community and acceptance of the ultimate necessity of achieving more widely distributed prosperity. The resources realistically available for assistance are very scarce, however, and their effective application is correspondingly important. As the internal community gathers the will to act, knowledge of how to do it becomes a major consideration.

All this makes it particularly important to learn from relevant experience. The period of the cold war overlapped a worldwide process

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of decolonization. International institutions emerged that are dedicated to providing developmental assistance across sovereign jurisdictions and cultural differences. A record has been accumulated that is full of very instructive lessons, lessons that have been learned at the cost of many failed initiatives but that also enjoy the benefit of some constructive discoveries.

A particularly critical segment of this record concerns experience with providing emergency food relief to populations caught in circumstances of life-threatening famine. Such situations reflect the most extreme breakdown of social order and present the most compelling imperatives for international action. They also make effective action unusually difficult. Though the international community has always had adequate food to prevent mass starvation, distributing it to threatened populations has presented major practical difficulties deriving from the circumstances that cause the famine itself. The individuals at greatest risk are often also the least accessible. The process of giving them vital commodities tempts thieves and weakens indigenous producers. Emergency intervention even for the most compelling of reasons can readily have perverse effects on a society in crisis.

The recent historical record contains ample evidence of such effects, but also guidelines for mitigating them. As the international community faces the formidable and unavoidable task of responding to the needs of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, it must bring accumulated experience to bear. Episodes of emergency famine are clearly possible. Even if unpredictable fortune proves to be less harsh, the experience with emergency relief operations informs the general process of international assistance.

This study focuses on two famine emergencies in the Sudan during the 1980S and the response they generated from inside the country and from the international community. The first famine, triggered by prolonged drought, affected mostly the western and eastern parts of the North during the years 1983-86. The second famine affected mostly the inhabitants of the southern Sudan, where a civil war of great ferocity has been raging intermittently since 1955; it halted in 197Z and broke out again in 1983. The conflict-related famine has been particularly severe since early 1988. The salient feature of both emergencies was the reticence and denial that characterized the response of the government in Khartoum and aggravated the emergencies. This

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attitude reflects two sets of factors that can be classified as regionalism and ethnicity. Each has political implications.

The regional factors include the country's size (the largest in Africa), its varied ecological and environmental conditions, its sparse population, and its rudimentary communication and transportation systems. All these factors are manifested in and compounded by disparities and inequities in the distribution system.

The ethnic factors include the racial, cultural, and religious diversity across the country. The most significant is the dichotomy between the Arab-Muslim North and the indigenously African South, which has a Christian elite. Diversity is by no means limited to that dualism, however. Differences within these categories are also profound and pronounced. These regional and ethnic diversities reflect vast distances from Khartoum in physical, political, and socioeconomic terms that explain the separation, if not alienation, of the national leadership from the rural populace.

These spatial and mental distances contributed to a vacuum of moral responsibility reflected in the government's persistent reluctance to provide relief to the affected population. The international media, initially stimulated by the dire conditions of the Ethiopian refugees fleeing into the Sudan, helped to alert the world in 1984 to the Sudan crisis. The international community then moved in to fill the moral vacuum and to pressure the government to be more responsive to the tragedy.

Once the government took the necessary steps, an unprecedented international relief operation was launched to compensate for the earlier neglect and to provide the government with the needed technical capacity to arrange for and distribute food. Many diverse donors, humanitarian organizations, and on-the-ground relief workers were involved in the emergency, with the United Nations and its specialized agencies coordinating the efforts. The experience of the emergency operations mounted in response to the drought-generated emergency laid the groundwork for the even more challenging international response to the conflict-related famine several years later.

The data and commentary that compose this volume have their origins in two recent studies of the emergency relief operations. The first was an evaluation conducted by one of the coauthors, Francis M. Deng, in 1986 at the request of the United Nations Office for

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Emergency Operations in Africa (OEOA). The second was a case study of Operation Lifeline Sudan, conducted in 1990 by a team of independent researchers headed by the other coauthor, Larry Minear.

The first study, which took a detailed look at the UN-coordinated response to the drought emergency of 1983-86, sought to review the international community's experience while it was still fresh, distilling from it lessons that could strengthen the effectiveness of emergency relief activities in similar situations.

The OEOA was created on December 17, 1984, by the UN secretary general in an effort to bring a higher level of political visibility and organizational coherence to UN relief efforts in Africa, which had hitherto taken a more country-by-country approach. The OEOA was set up, said one of its managers, "very much as the peacetime equivalent to putting the UN on a wartime footing."

The OEOA was based in New York with a liaison office in Geneva. It was directed by Bradford Morse, administrator of the UN Development Program, assisted by Maurice Strong as executive coordinator. Both men not only commanded great respect within the international system but also had far-reaching connections in the public and private sectors. Their remarkable contribution was perhaps most apparent in the fund-raising momentum generated by the OEOA within and outside the UN system.

The OEOA used such eminent organizations as the Inter-Action Council of the Former Heads of State and Government to mount a massive effort that climaxed in the March 1985 Geneva conference on the African emergency, at which the world demonstrated a generosity that surprised even the optimists. The generosity of the international community was commensurate with the magnitude of the disaster; the total amount mobilized for OEOA operations before the end of 1986 was $4.6 billion.

By the time the conference was convened, the OEOA estimated that some 30 million to 35 million people in twenty countries in sub-Saharan Africa faced starvation and death. When the OEOA closed on October 31, 1986, good rains had returned to most of the area, the food crisis had eased, and relief needs were abating. Serious emergencies continued only in Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, and the Sudan, where civil strife rather than the weather was the main culprit. During its two years of existence, in addition to helping raise the $4.6 billion in emergency assistance, the OEOA accelerated multilateral

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and bilateral relief operations in the region. The monitoring that had been performed by the OEOA was transferred to a newly created position, that of director of emergencies, reporting to the secretary general.

To assess the OEOA's effectiveness in the Sudan, the evaluation during the latter part of 1986 sought out more than fifty persons who were or had been directly involved in the relief effort, both inside and outside the Sudan. Those interviewed included UN officials at headquarters and in the field, national and regional Sudanese government officials, leaders of the insurgent Sudan People's Liberation Movement, representatives of foreign governments and of nongovernmental organizations in the Sudan, university professors, journalists, and Sudanese at the local level. The names of those interviewed are listed in the appendix.

A companion study of OEOA effectiveness in neighboring Ethiopia was carried out at the same time by Ambassador Anders Forsse of Sweden. His study is referenced a number of times in this volume. The two evaluations were completed in late 1986.

During the evaluation of the response to the drought-generated famine in the North, conflict-related tragedy was simmering in the South but had not yet reached the boiling point. For that reason, the evolving civil war, which at the time had at most a limited effect on relief operations in the North, was only alluded to in the OEOA study.

Three years later, the magnitude of the conflict and its human consequences had reached unprecedented proportions. In March 1989 the international community launched another major relief initiative, Operation Lifeline Sudan. The initial Lifeline undertaking, which concentrated its efforts between April and September 1989, was the subject of the second study.

The review of Lifeline was carried out by an independent team of four African and three American researchers: Tabyiegen Agnes Aboum, Eshetu Chole, Koste Manibe, Abdul Mohammed, Jennefer Sebstad, Thomas G. Weiss, and Larry Minear. During the period from March 1990 through June 1990, the team interviewed about two hundred persons, some of them the same people who had been sought out for the earlier study. The focus of the initial evaluation had been on the response to the drought that in 1983-86 affected primarily large areas in the North. The later case study centered on the emergency in the South, which, while aggravated by drought, had its roots in

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the country's resurgent civil war. This volume recapitulates parts of the case study of Operation Lifeline Sudan that illuminate the problems of providing famine relief.

This work thus places under a single cover the OEOA evaluation, which covers the years 1984-86, and the later case study of Operation Lifeline Sudan, which treats the years 1988-89. It also takes note of the roots of the drought-induced famine in 1983, the period between the major international relief initiatives, and the extension of Lifeline operations through 1990 and into 1991. It thus assesses famine and emergency relief operations in the years 1983-91.

The international emergency relief operations treated in this volume, and indeed their counterparts elsewhere in Africa and around the world, represent the best efforts of a wide circle of actors. Included, in addition to the people who needed such assistance themselves, are governmental organizations, nongovernmental groups, and individuals. The Sudan experience in 1984-86 and again in the heyday of Lifeline in 1989 was a triumph of humanitarian idealism and global solidarity that is rightly a cause for appreciation by the recipients and for satisfaction by those who provided such aid.

Acclaim notwithstanding, the analysis of the four challenges presented in this volume suggests that the experience was not without contradictions and ambivalences. Whatever the shortcomings of the relief operations, however, they developed during an emergency in which saving lives was the top priority. Any criticism, therefore, is intended not to question the need for emergency relief operations, but to improve such activities in the future. Past relief operations, critically and thoughtfully reviewed, may become the basis for more effective future activities. Indeed, the international public is coming to expect and to demand better performance.

Two methodological observations are in order. First, looking back at the crises, we often lack the original sense of urgency, sometimes bordering on panic, that characterized the desperate scramble to save lives. While nonoperational issues may loom larger in hindsight, this analysis does not intend to minimize the urgency that made it difficult to attend to broader issues at the time.

Second, much of the material in this volume is drawn from extensive interviews with major participants during the periods under review. Those interviews inform the conclusions reached and are frequently quoted in the text. Our general approach, particularly in

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the OEOA review, has been to reproduce such comments–many of which were shared in confidence–without attribution. Quotations and observations pertaining to Operation Lifeline Sudan are documented in the original study and referred to in the notes in this volume.

Finally, a word about the organization of the book itself. Chapter I presents the crises in the context of the salient facts about the country: its geography, its demography, and its regional politics, which affected the two emergency situations. It offers some observations on the underlying causes of famine, the attitudes of national governments, and evolving international perceptions.

Chapter 2, which treats drought-related famine during the mid-decade, and chapter 3, which examines conflict-related famine thereafter, discuss four problems exemplified in the responses to each crisis: the external nature of famine relief; the context in which relief is provided; the coordination of relief activities; and the ambivalence of the results of relief.

Looking to the future, chapter 4 suggests ways in which the international community, learning from the problems of relief operations in the Sudan, may strengthen such interventions in the future. The chapter also recognizes the increasingly positive international climate marking the end of the cold war, in particular the recent humanitarian intervention in Iraq, as an indicator of an emerging trend.

For a number of reasons, this review of emergency relief operations has a special timeliness. First, the emergency in the Sudan has continued apace during 1991-92, with an estimated 7 million to 9 million people still vulnerable to famine. Efforts by national authorities and the international community to assist them are lagging. In fact, in April 1992 the United Nations suspended relief operations altogether.

Second, recurrent food shortages in the Sudan and other sub-Saharan African countries have led to calls for recreating the OEOA or establishing some other structure in the United Nations with similar functions. A group of more than forty nongovernmental organizations wrote to UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar in June 1991, encouraging reestablishment of the OEOA. "We believe current famine conditions in the Horn of Africa and other African nations are potentially worse than those in 1984-86," they stated.

In response to the worsening crisis in the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, the secretary-general in July 1991 announced the strengthening

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of the unit for special emergency programs within the Department for Special Political Questions, Regional Co-operation, Decolonization and Trusteeship, to which the residual OEOA functions had been entrusted in late 1986. Once again, the world community recognized a need to move beyond ad hoc responses to crises in individual countries through an approach that would give higher visibility to the humanitarian crisis and greater coherence to international efforts.

Third, the United Nations is concerned with improving its response to emergencies. The Economic and Social Council discussed the problem in July 1991, the General Assembly discussed it in September and December 1991, and the issue is likely to engage the General Assembly in the years to come. Of special concern are refugees whose flight from persecution carries them across national borders and returnees and persons displaced within their own national borders who lack international protection and assistance.

The heads of state from seven major industrialized countries, meeting in mid-July 1991 in London, underlined the importance of these issues. "The recent tragedies in Bangladesh, Iraq and the Horn of Africa," observed the Economic Summit communiqué, "demonstrate the need to reinforce UN relief in coping with emergencies." The | heads of state called for "moves to strengthen the coordination and to accelerate the effective delivery of all UN relief for major disasters." Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who became UN secretary-general on January 1, 1992, has a clear mandate to improve the structures for emergency humanitarian operations around the world. In early 1992 he appointed Swedish Ambassador Jan Eliasson to the new position of undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, following up on a resolution (46-182) approved by the General Assembly in December 1991.

Finally, there is much talk of a new international order in which I the politicization that skewed the responses of governments and infiltrated the work of the United Nations during the cold war gives way to approaches that are less ideological and more directed toward need. By overriding Iraqi sovereignty to provide humanitarian assistance and protection to the Kurds, the UN Security Council has paved the way for the current discussion of a new humanitarian order in which governments are held–by force, if necessary–to higher standards of respect for human life.

Although the humanitarian content of an eventual new order has

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yet to be delineated, more effective responses to urgent crises such as those described in this volume will test the effectiveness of any new policies and institutional mechanisms. Much remains to be learned from recent emergency operations in the Sudan to guide the framing and implementation of a more effective international humanitarian response.