SUDAN: Food Runs Out In Rebel Besieged Town of Juba

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Oct 15 1997 (IPS) - A food shortage in the rebel besieged southern Sudan capital of Juba has forced thousands to leave the city.

According to a local aid worker who arrived from Sudan this week, “the situation is desperate. People say there is no point dying in Juba when one can survive on wild fruits or edible green leaves in the countryside,” said a local aid worker who arrived from Sudan this week.

The worker, who refused to be named for security reasons, told IPS on Wednesday that an acute food shortage combined with a threat of insecurity had taken a toll on a city of some 300,000 inhabitants, mostly displaced from Sudan’s 14-year civil war.

“If emergency food fails to arrive on time, many will die or leave the city,” he said.

On Tuesday, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said it was sending emergency food supplies by barge to the town. WFP spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume told journalists in Geneva, Switzerland, that a convoy of barges loaded with 2,700 tonnes of food would arrive in Juba in mid-November.

She said some 374,000 hungry people along the Nile River would also benefit from the food supplies.

More than 10,000 people, mostly former government employees, have reportedly fled to Wonduruba, a village some 130 kilometres southwest of Juba, since May. A non-governmental organisation, the Sudan Service International (SSI), which is running a relief project there, says people arrive in the village in bad shape.

Last month, the leader of the main faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), Col John Garang, who says his rebel forces are tightening a noose around Juba, appealed for international food aid for the people in southern Sudan.

Garang said the “acute food shortage” in southern Sudan had been caused by the “El Nino effect”, a warming of the eastern tropical Pacific occurring every few years, which disrupts the weather pattern of the region. Scientists say it has been moving towards Africa, where it causes heavy rainfall in some cases and drought in others.

The SPLA leader, who said his forces control the whole of southern Sudan, urged the international community to rush in food, medicine and blankets to alleviate the situation. “There has been no rain in Sudan this year. The situation is very bad indeed,” he told a press conference here.

This is, however, not the first time that famine is threatening southern Sudan. More than 300,000 people died from famine-related diseases in the south of the Islamic-ruled country in 1987, prompting the United Nations to launch Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) in 1988.

But since its formation, the OLS has run into a series of obstacles as both the government and the SPLA have been using food aid as a political weapon in the civil war, which began over 14 years ago.

SPLA officials here complain that the government has refused to approve aircraft landing rights to the SPLA-controlled towns of Rumbek, Tonj, Yirol and Yei.

OLS, in a report made available to IPS recently, also said it had failed to receive flight clearance for the towns of Ajiep, Akak, Thiekthon, Akon, Wunrok, Mayen Abun, Warrap, Panyagor and Yomciir.

However, during the period between Sep 1-6, the OLS said its WFP partner had delivered a total of 353.26 metric tonnes of food commodities to 80,824 beneficiaries in southern Sudan.

Of this total, 121.26 tonnes of the food commodities were delivered to two sites in Yei, a town on the border with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In August, FAO’s Mwite Rukandema told journalists in Nairobi, that food was available in the Sudan, but that reaching the needy, especially in the remote parts of the country, posed logistical problems for the government.

Rukandema, who is based at the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) headquarters in Rome, said that “the overall food outlook in Sudan for 1997 has so far been generally satisfactory …although the situation in some provinces remains highly precarious.”

The FAO said six states in Darfur, Kordofan, Red Sea State and in the South, have an aggregate deficit of around 600,000 tonnes of cereals. While some of the deficits may be met through normal internal trade, prospects for an easy flow of supplies are not that good, especially in North Kordofan and North Darfur.

“In those areas where accessibility poses the greatest problem, a large number of persons are bound to experience hardships. The situation would be worse in the southern states where economic activity has been adversely affected by many years of civil war.

“In this part of the coutry, some 2.6 million war-affected and displaced persons would need emergency food aid estimated at 52,176 tonnes of which cereals would account for 39,000 tonnes,” said the FAO’s Early Warning System launched here by Rukandema in August.

More than one million people have died in southern Sudan since the SPLA launched its bush war in 1983, demanding greater autonomy for the predominantly non-Muslim South — home to 35 percent of the 30 million Sudanese — from the Arab, Muslim North.