100 Day Fast for Darfur

“Darfur: Silent Famine in the Making”

Eric Reeves
April 24, 2008

The Darfur region of western Sudan is site of the world’s largest
humanitarian operation; it is also on the verge of famine. With an
extraordinary annual budget, and almost four years of large-scale
presence, the Darfur relief operation will enter the coming rainy season
witnessing staggering numbers of malnourished civilians, particularly
children. Much of the evidence for this impending catastrophe has been
available for some time, but the brutal regime in Khartoum has used its
bureaucratic powers and threats of humanitarian expulsion to intimidate
both UN and international nongovernmental relief organizations
(INGO’s). The most culpable silence is that of the UN children’s
agency, UNICEF, lead agency for reporting on malnutrition in Darfur.
This is the organization that has calculated it is better to allow
critical humanitarian truths to be concealed than to risk offending a
genocidal regime that has the perverse power to control humanitarian
access.

To be sure, there is a difficult balance that must be struck:
self-censorship is a grim task that must be mastered to some degree by
all who work on the ground in Darfur. But UNICEF has been guilty of a
shameful cowardice in failing to report on rising malnutrition, already
at highly alarming levels among children under five, levels that may
double in the coming months according to knowledgeable UN officials.
Much of this could have been known months ago, but UN officials have
also confirmed that at least seven nutrition surveys conducted since
August 2007 still await Khartoum’s permission to be released. The
regime’s demand that humanitarians wait many months before sharing
studies of malnutrition undermines the organizational ability to
mobilize appropriate responses in timely fashion.

Malnutrition rates, especially for children under five, already exceed
emergency thresholds in much of Darfur, as they did more than half a
year ago when UNICEF last oversaw a published malnutrition study. This
is not surprising, given a range of reports and anecdotal evidence going
back to the beginning of the year. The UN’s World Food Program (WFP)
has already significantly cut rations for many recipients, inevitably
accelerating malnutrition. At any one moment, WFP now has only half the
food tonnage required on the road corridor from Port Sudan to Darfur,
over 1,000 kilometers to the west. This has led WFP to announce
recently that rations will be cut more severely in a matter of days—to
50% of the kilo-calories required to sustain human life. Insecurity is
responsible for this dramatic decline in transport capacity; and
Khartoum’s refusal to facilitate deployment of a UN-authorized
protection force is the primary reason this and other critical
humanitarian corridors can’t be secured. WFP also lacks funds for its
vital air service, the primary means for aid workers to travel to
program sites amidst the desperate insecurity of Darfur.

Humanitarians on the ground report an explosion in food prices—500
per cent for cereals in one location—an ominous harbinger of famine.
WFP also indicates that it is falling well short of pre-positioning
adequate food-stocks prior to the rainy season, which coincides with the
traditional “hunger gap” between spring planting and fall harvest.
Many locations in Darfur become completely inaccessible during the heavy
rainy season, and food must be in place before wadis (dry river beds)
become raging torrents and the terrain a sea of mud.

Last fall’s harvests were disastrous, particularly in North and South
Darfur (three-quarters of the region’s population), and there is
little evidence that next fall’s harvests will be better.
Khartoum’s brutal Arab militia, the Janjaweed, keep African farmers
from cultivating their lands through violent threats, and increasingly
destroy crops before harvest. Growing numbers of Darfuri civilians have
given up trying to fashion a living in such threatening circumstances
and have migrated to camps for displaced persons that are already
overcrowded, putting yet greater demands on an insufficient food supply.
Even so, at any one time there may be hundreds of thousands of people
beyond the reach of WFP. More than 3 million people are dependent to
varying degrees on food assistance. The gains in addressing
malnutrition achieved since major humanitarian efforts began in 2004 are
all being lost.

Last summer a collaborative effort by UN agencies found that Global
Acute Malnutrition (GAM) was already above emergency thresholds: 16
percent as of September 2007; for children 6 – 29 months old the rate
was 21.3 percent. There is perhaps no more sensitive barometer of
overall humanitarian conditions than GAM rates for children under five.
Yet Khartoum is deliberately delaying the collection and dissemination
of new GAM data. Indeed, surveys are sometimes simply denied. The wali
(governor) of North Darfur State has arrogated to himself and a
committee of self-appointed “experts” the right to vet malnutrition
studies prior to release; he also unilaterally decided that nutrition
surveys will be allowed only from May to June and October to
November—however urgent humanitarians may find such surveys for their
work and planning at other times.

Despite these restrictions, designed to compromise humanitarian
efforts, the UN says little or nothing. Ameerah Haq, the UN humanitarian
coordinator for Sudan, and UNICEF personnel, with primary responsibility
for reporting on malnutrition, are the most culpable, but they have too
much company, including in New York. INGO’s can’t be more
assertive than the UN, but privately they convey information revealing
an extremely ominous situation—and the urgency only grows.

Ultimately, of course, responsibility for standing up to Khartoum and
holding the regime accountable for its many previous agreements to
facilitate humanitarian assistance, as well as to permit unfettered
deployment of UN-authorized security forces, belongs to the UN and
powerful member states, especially the Security Council’s Permanent
Five members. Theirs is the most unforgivable silence, and if it
continues will signal acquiescence in the deaths of further hundreds of
thousands of Darfuri civilians.

[Eric Reeves is author of “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in
the Darfur Genocide”]

Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu
http://www.sudanreeves.org