Sudan Threatened with Disaster

By William R. Doerner

When a rising tide of refugees briefly provoked rioting in the city of Port Sudan three years ago, Sudanese President Gaafar Nimeiri came under mounting pressure from some members of his government to close his nation's borders. Nimeiri would have none of it. During a climactic Cabinet meeting on the issue, he interrupted the debate and dramatically invoked the ancient Arab tradition of hospitality toward strangers. Said the President: "They are the guests of Sudan."

To his credit, and possibly to his regret, Nimeiri has stuck by those words ever since. Even as the epic famine sweeping Ethiopia has increased the number of victims crossing into eastern Sudan to some 3,000 daily, Nimeiri has continued his nation's traditional open-door policy. Yet despite a fast- building effort by local authorities and international relief agencies to provide food and shelter for the Ethiopians, the refugees are finding themselves in a nation that is almost as bereft of aid as the one they left. There are now about 1 million refugees in the country, and their numbers could swell by 600,000 by the end of March, relief officials predict. The worsening plight of the region, says a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, is rapidly becoming "a disaster of major proportions."

Nor is the refugees' arrival the only major crisis confronting Sudan and its beleaguered President. Plagued by the same lack of rainfall and economic mismanagement that have devastated Ethiopia, up to a quarter of Sudan's 21 million citizens are facing the threat of extreme hunger in the months ahead. In the southern part of the country, a rebellion waged by armed guerrillas against Nimeiri's high-handed Islamic rule is growing, and the provincial capital of Juba is in danger of attack. Though Nimeiri had freed almost 300 of his jailed political enemies in December and January, just over a week ago he publicly hanged one of his more persistent adversaries. Known as a wily survivor over almost 15 years of rule, Nimeiri has never before faced such a formidable array of challenges.

One of his trickiest political problems has been the arrival among the refugees of Ethiopian Jews, called Falashas (the Amharic word for strangers). The remnants of an ancient tribe that has kept alive Jewish religious practices, these Ethiopians became the object of a secret evacuation by Israel, code-named Operation Moses. According to various estimates, between 3,000 and 7,000 of them reached Israel before word of the rescue operation leaked out. Nimeiri, whose government is a member of the Arab League and has no diplomatic relations with Israel, was embarrassed by the spotlight on Sudanese cooperation in the resettlement and ordered the airlift cut off. That left several thousand Falashas still in Sudan, many with relatives already in Israel.

Nimeiri quickly came under intense pressure from Western governments to find a way to help the Falashas on humanitarian grounds. Not wanting to imperil his moderate reputation and close ties to the U.S., Nimeiri last week declared: "I won't help Israel by sending them more people," he announced. "But if they want to go away from here--to Europe, to the U.S., to any place else--I don't care." That obviously opened the door to Falasha rescue operations organized by Western governments, perhaps with the eventual goal of quietly resettling the Falashas in Israel. As a sign of good faith in the matter, a Sudanese official last week got in touch with the refugee commission in Geneva to discuss its possible role in evacuating the Falashas.

A major setback to the program is the fact that Falasha refugees in Sudan have blended into the anonymity of the camps and are sharing in the tragic fate of their other occupants. Relief officials estimate that at least 2,000 of them have died since their migration to Sudan began last spring. Nimeiri's offer to allow the evacuation of Falasha refugees to nations other than Israel did not draw any immediate criticism from fellow members of the Arab League. But at least one Arab leader put Israel on notice that it must not permit those who migrate to Israel to take up residence in territory claimed by the Palestinians. Warned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak: "If this leads to the settlement of Ethiopians in the West Bank, it will be an extremely grave matter."

As for Sudan's other refugees, which include some 116,000 Chadians, 250,000 Ugandans and 5,000 Zairians, the outlook is bleak. Once regarded as the potential breadbasket of the Arab world, Sudan has in four years gone from being an exporter to an importer of its sorghum, a grainlike staple crop. Through a combination of bad weather and overgrazing of arable land, production fell from 3.4 million tons in 1981 to 1.3 million tons last year. The result has been bread shortages throughout the country, even in the capital of Khartoum, and the frequent unavailability of supplies for the refugee camps. Says Hassan Atteya, Sudan's deputy commissioner for refugees: "There is no reserve of food, so we have to buy it locally. This is a problem, because Sudan has a food shortage this year."

The U.S. is supplying about $200 million in aid this fiscal year to Sudan, Washington's second-largest program of foreign assistance in Africa, after Egypt. In addition, partly to cope with the refugee crisis, Washington is donating at least another $60 million in emergency aid. But most of that will have to be used to feed hungry Sudanese. Says Amala Hussein, the mother of six from the drought-stricken region of Northern Kordofan: "In our area there is only hunger and thirst now. In the summer our goats, sheep and camels were all dying from lack of grass."

In troubled southern Sudan, an almost two-year-old guerrilla war waged by members of the Southern Sudan People's Liberation Army has spread from the Upper Nile and Bahr el Ghazal regions to Equatoria. Two weeks ago rebels captured a busload of Norwegian relief workers on the road between Juba and Torit. Its occupants were released on the condition that Norway abandon its aid program in Sudan, which it temporarily did. In recognition of the growing frequency of Liberation Army attacks along Equatorian roads and waterways, the U.S. and Britain also began evacuating dependents from the province. Rebel Leader John Garang, a U.S.-educated former colonel in the Sudanese army, has vowed to attack the city of Juba in the next few weeks. The rebels, who are mostly Christians and animists, have chafed under northern domination for years and especially object to the Islamic law imposed by Nimeiri in 1983. Their major victory so far has been to interrupt, by killing or capturing non-Sudanese workers, two major economic projects: oilfields, under exploration by Chevron Oil Co., and the Jonglei Canal in southern Sudan. Neither Chevron nor the French canal builders have dared to resume operations.

Washington has kept a scrupulously correct distance from any involvement in the insurgency problem. This is despite the fact that it views Sudan as a $ strategically important nation, both as protector of the southern flank of Egypt, its primary Arab ally, and as a possible staging ground for any military operations mounted to protect the Middle East's oilfields. The U.S. has declined to supply Nimeiri with helicopter gunships, with which the Sudanese army could effectively track down roving bands of guerrillas.

Nimeiri has been more successful in handling another problem that openly challenged his political and religious authority. It came from Mahmoud Taha, the 76-year-old leader of the Republican Brothers and one of the Nimeiri opponents freed from prison in the recent amnesty. A religious maverick who sometimes claimed to be the resurrected Christ, Taha proceeded to write a tract criticizing Islamic law. His execution was ordered after a trial that lasted less than two hours. In a protest, Washington called the trial a "clear violation of human rights." Some 2,000 Sudanese, many of them militant Sufis carrying religious banners, and Muslim Brotherhood members gathered in Khartoum's Kobar Prison courtyard to witness the hanging, amid shouts of "Death to the enemy of God!"

Nimeiri has no shortage of rivals for power, the most prominent being Sadiq el Mahdi, 48, a great-grandson of the Sudanese leader who governed Sudan after defeating British General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon at Khartoum in 1885. But none has defied the President as openly as did Taha. To political observers in Khartoum, Nimeiri was simply demonstrating his power. Perhaps he had in mind the fact that in March he will be leaving for his annual visit to the U.S. for a medical checkup and conferences with U.S. officials in Washington. He could hardly forget that it was on his return from a similar trip, in 1976, that Libyan-backed enemies only narrowly failed in a major coup attempt.

With reporting by Philip Finnegan/Khartoum