Hanging in the balance

By Mohamed Khaled

Immediately after the agreement, the United Nations, through Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the umbrella group that coordinates delivery of food in war zones in the Sudan, laid down its plan to deliver at least 18,000 tons of food up to September. The food will be delivered by air, road and rail.

According to aid organisations, air delivery will be important in the period up to October because seasonal rains will render roads impassable.

OLS will be in a race with time to accomplish the job within the three months of the cease-fire while battling against the hazards of the rainy season.

An estimated 2.4 million people in southern Sudan are at risk of starvation. The most vulnerable are the 1.2 million people living in Bahr Al-Ghazal.

The famine resulted from last year's poor harvest due to drought and the civil war in the south, which has prevented people from planting crops. The fighting had also made it impossible for relief agencies to deliver food to the worst hit areas.

Aid organisations described the famine as similar to the ones which hit Ethiopia in 1984 and Somalia in 1992.

Until recently, the situation in southern Sudan has been a forgotten human tragedy. But the famine in Bahr Al-Ghazal has attracted wide media attention in recent months.

Catherine Bertini, the executive director of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), recently called upon the international community to step in to put an end to the fighting which has hampered relief delivery in southern Sudan.

"Millions of people are caught in the cease-fire," she said. "What is clear is that the numbers of the hungry are almost certainly going to rise."

OLS had earlier criticised the Sudanese government for refusing to open airstrips to aid agencies delivering relief. But President Omar Al-Bashir threw the blame on the SPLA, saying his government had supported the idea of a cease-fire earlier and that it was the rebels who had opposed the proposals.

The SPLA, for its part, blames the government. "OLS arrangements for safe corridors in the south would have been enough to avert the disaster, but the government was reluctant to offer clearance for aid agencies' planes," SPLA spokesman Yasir Arman told Al-Ahram Weekly. "This has led the situation to deteriorate to a point where more than OLS arrangements are now needed. This is why SLPA took the initiative of proposing the recent cease-fire."

Although the government had at first called for a month's cease-fire, Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail later announced that the military would suspend war for three months.

However, the cease-fire agreement is still surrounded by uncertainty. The ongoing fighting among southern pro-government groups, who signed a peace agreement with the government last year, remains a big problem since the groups are not party to the cease-fire.

Also, the last two cease-fire agreements between the government and SPLA were repeatedly broken by both sides. Aid agencies have warned that any breaks in the current cease-fire would make it almost impossible to contain the famine.

Derek Fatchet, the British foreign office junior minister who mediated the agreement, underlined the need for a third party to monitor the implementation of the agreement closely and ensure that neither side takes advantage of the cease-fire.

However, while the cease-fire has been widely hailed as a positive step to contain the tragedy in the south, there are still no signs that it will lead to an open-ended truce and a lasting peaceful settlement to the conflict.

As the SPLA was quick to point out, the cease-fire is based on purely humanitarian grounds and not any kind of political agreement between the government and the rebels. "The military operations will not cease in other parts of southern and eastern Sudan," said SPLA spokesman Arman.