The Greater Tragedy

As the Congo's town politicians bickered and battled, few of them had a thought for a greater tragedy unfolding in the remote bush of South Kasai. There 300,000 pathetic Baluba tribesmen, hurled out of their homelands last year by the tribal fighting, huddled homeless and hungry in a harsh, inhospitable region where few crops grew. Now, unless massive help arrived soon, many of them faced death from sheer starvation. Nearly all the children suffered from the dread protein-deficiency disease called kwashiorkor, which shriveled limbs, swelled bellies and fouled the blood. Already, several thousand adults and children have died, and hundreds more are considered too far gone to save. The U.N.'s Food & Agriculture Organization pronounced it the world's worst famine since India's 1943 food crisis, when a million died.

Paradoxically, only a few hundred miles to the northwest, the Congo's lush Equator and Leopoldville provinces had bananas, nuts and palm oil aplenty. But the transport breakdown and regional feuding kept normal trading at a standstill. Only hope lies in the crash feeding programs undertaken by the United Nations, whose officials estimate that a minimum of 120 tons of food must be distributed daily, but until recently have had to make do with less than half that volume. To fill its supply pipelines, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization is canvassing U.N. member nations for 10,000 tons of corn, 10,000 tons of rice, 3,000 tons of dried fish, 1,250 tons of dried milk.

To encourage planting, the U.N. also has rushed in seed, is handing out 10,000 hoes so that the Balubas can sow the dry, sandy soil before the end of the planting season in February. But some of the starving tribesmen are too weak to bury their own dead, much less till the soil. Others are so hungry that they toss the hoes aside and simply eat the seed.

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