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Human Rights Watch blamed the warring parties in Sudan's fifteen-year civil war for the country's devastating famine, which killed thousands of people in 1998 and affected more than 2.6 million in a country of about 27 million. Famine threatens to recur in 1999.

The report charges that the government's abusive tactics, and the predatory practices of rebel forces and government-sponsored tribal militia, have turned this famine into a disaster requiring the largest emergency relief operation in the world in 1998, and the largest airlift operation since the Berlin airlift. The government spends about one million dollars a day on the war, roughly the same amount the international community spent on relief at the height of the famine. A cease-fire among the warring parties in the worst-hit famine area of the south, Bahr El Ghazal, has not been strictly enforced and will expire on April 15, 1999.

"If the cease-fire is not extended, the disaster of last year will be repeated in southern Sudan," said Jemera Rone, author of the report and the Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch. "The tribal militias who looted and burned, and killed and captured so many civilians last year, are not obeying the cease-fire now. They are armed and backed by the government, and it must restrain them." Rone urged the international community to bring all possible pressure to bear on the Sudanese government and rebels to end attacks on civilians and looting of civilian foodstuffs, including cattle.

The 200-page report, "Famine in Sudan, 1998: The Human Rights Causes," urges the warring parties to end looting and attacks on civilians, as well as the diversion of civilian relief aid. It calls on the Sudan government and rebel authorities to punish those guilty of such abuses. And it asks that the international community actively support U.N. human rights monitors for Sudan, either inside the country or on its borders, who would be tasked to promptly inform the world of human rights abuses, especially those that might lead to another famine. Finally, the report calls on the government of Sudan to honor the promise it made to the U.N. Secretary-General in 1998, to provide humanitarian access to rebel areas of the Nuba Mountains which have been besieged for ten years by the government.

Most of the famine victims were in the southern third of the country, where the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) is strongest. The southern Dinka population in Bahr El Ghazal, which is suspected of supporting the rebel cause, has been the worst hit by famine. For years, government counterinsurgency strategy has used army and tribal militia to attack civilians and displace or kill them, looting their cattle and grain, and burning their villages. Some women and children have been abducted for use as domestic slaves. "The famine is over for the time being," said Rone. "But the 'hunger gap' between last year's slim harvest and this year's harvest could last from April to August, or even September. Without international assistance, many people will not make it through the 'gap' -- and if there is fighting again, and the tribal militias are not stopped from killing and looting, the situation will get even worse." Rone noted that the looting of tens of thousands of milk-producing cows in 1998 had made this year's "hunger gap" even worse.

A key turning point in the 1998 famine involved Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, a Dinka warlord who had been armed and supplied for years by the government to attack Dinka villages. Kerubino defected from the government side to the SPLA in January 1998, and tried and failed to capture Wau, the second largest town in the south, and two other government towns. Some 100,000 Dinka and Jur in those towns fled in fear of retaliation, heading straight into a rural area where some 250,000 people were already at risk of famine because of drought and continual raiding. Hundreds of civilians who did not flee Wau were massacred by government forces in the days following the fighting.

Immediately after this exodus, the government placed a ban on all relief flights into Bahr El Ghazal that lasted practically two months, in an attempt to punish the civilian population. The population at risk of starvation climbed to one million. When the ban was finally lifted as a result of international pressure, and relief supplies began to arrive, the SPLA began diverting the relief food for its own soldiers, and local chiefs redistributed relief as well. This, plus continued raids and U.N. logistics problems, drove perhaps 90,000 civilians to government garrison towns in search of relief food; the death rate in those locations shot up. A cease-fire on July 15, 1998 (later extended to April 15, 1999) ended the famine-provoking raids for several months and brought better delivery of relief food. The death toll began to drop, although the food shortage is projected to continue until late 1999. Two factors make the future very uncertain: the re-defection of the mercurial Dinka warlord Kerubino from the SPLA and his negotiations with the government to resume his career as a government militia leader; and renewed raiding by tribal militias in early 1999, as the military supply train to Wau transported them and their horses into Bahr El Ghazal from the north.

Another seriously stricken area was Western Upper Nile, belonging to the southern Nuer tribe. It suffered because two pro-government Nuer forces were fighting each other over political and military control of this territory, where a government-organized international consortium is drilling for oil to be piped north. The government directly armed both sides, one the ex-rebel forces with whom it signed a peace agreement in 1997, and the other the Nuer warlord Paulino Matiep, who undertook scorched earth campaigns, killing, burning, looting, and destroying Nuer villages and meager health and educational structures. As a result, some 150,000 civilians, most of them displaced by the fighting, were at risk, but the U.N. relief operation was unable to reach them because of the unstable military situation. Not coincidentally, the Dinka warlord Kerubino is related by marriage to the Nuer warlord Paulino, who is currently providing Kerubino with safe harbor.

In the SPLA-held areas of the central Nuba Mountains, some 20,000 people at risk were not even included in the U.N.'s relief operations or statistics. The government's strategy in the mountains is to starve civilians into leaving the rebel areas, so it bans all U.N. access to them. Away from the eyes of the international community, the government's army and militia loot or destroy food, and capture civilians for internment in government "peace camps," where abuse and dismal conditions prevail despite international food relief flowing to the government side of the Nuba Mountains. In May 1998 the government promised the U.N. humanitarian access, but as of February 1999 this promise was not honored.

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