Robert Kaplan - Surrender or Starve

In all this time, the debate in the United States about famine had barely changed. Academic blather about development programs and a Western “commitment” to Africa filled up even more space on newspaper editorial pages in 1987 than had been the case in early 1984. Money and agricultural technology still could solve everything. Fingers still were being pointed at the European Economic Community because of the vast mountains of milk and butter it destroyed rather than ship to more needy areas of the globe. The far greater evil of Africa’s own callous and hypocritical attitudes toward its starving millions was much less written about, as if such information were charged and radioactive. Neither U.S. thinking nor that of the African ruling class was all that much affected by the unfolding of events on the ground during those momentous years in the Horn. The actual behavior of African leaders had little impact on the United States, just as U.S. efforts in Africa had little impact on African leaders.

On a late October night in 1986 I said goodbye for the last time to Athanasios Pagoulatos and took a battered taxi to the airport for the 2 a.m. flight to Nairobi. I did not think I would be coming back to Sudan. As the Khartoum dust scoured my eyes, two incidents replayed themselves in my mind that, for me, were emblematic of Africa as I briefly experienced it.

The first incident involved a colleague, Paul Vallely. He wrote a story about it entitled, “Riding the Lifeline Lorry” ( The Times, July 26, 1985). To my mind, it was the best single feature story I ever read about the famine. It’s too bad that the U.S. public never got to see it.

For weeks the requests had been trickling into the old British garrison post of El Geneina, the furthermost town in the west of Sudan….

These particular requests came from the chief of police at Beida, through the cursive handwriting of the little border town’s scribe. At first they were for food. Then last week came a plea for shrouds.

“We have nothing in which to bury our dead, and 15 children died yesterday,” said the letter addressed to Peter Verney, the Save the Children (SCF) representative in Geneina.

As Vallely related the story, so little food was coming into Geneina from Khartoum on account of floods and other difficulties that there was not enough to send onward to Beida, about fifty miles south along Sudan’s western border with Chad. Those dying of starvation in Beida were all Chadian refugees, and the local Sudanese commissioner Sherife was not cooperating in the release of emergency grain. Finally, however, Verney managed to secure 150 sacks of food and seed. Then the head of the Sudanese haulage firm doubled and tripled the price. Verney did not have enough cash on hand to pay for the lorry and in desperation went to the local army brigadier in Geneina, Ibrahim Muhammad, who told Verney, “This is the situation everywhere. No food is reaching the extremities. It reaches the hands but not the fingers. Of course you can have one of my trucks.”

Three hours after leaving Geneina for Beida, the food lorry got caught in a torrential rain. Vallely and the driver whom Verney had rented were stuck for nine hours in the mud; sixty peasants helped to dig the two men out.

It was two days before we reached Beida. …We were welcomed by Muhammad Ahmed Bashir, the local chief of police. Over sweet tea on the rafia mat before his office he was effusive in his thanks for the food.

“I will put it straight into the store with the other food.” The other food? “Yes, we already have 140 bags in store but we have had no authority from Sherife or his nephew Ali Mansour to distribute it.”

Because of Sudanese bureaucracy, Chadians were starving to death with food only a few feet away. The next day, Ali Mansour, the executive officer of the rural council, agreed to distribute the grain. “You will take my photograph,” he said to a news agency photographer with Vallely. “This will be good for me.”

The distribution caused a riot among the refugees. Sudanese soldiers responded by lashing at the crowd with whips in all directions. The news agency photographer started snapping away, even though editors had become bored with photos of starving Africans. The photographer confided to Vallely that starving people being whipped had novelty value that would result in his pictures gaining wide distribution. Sure enough, the photos of the riot in Beida were picked up in Europe.

I arrived in El Geneina a few weeks after Vallely had, and my first stop was at a feeding center for Chadian refugees fleeing civil war as well as drought. My guide asked if I would like to see a newborn baby. I said certainly. Although the population was growing all the time—and even in good years, food production could not keep pace with the population increase—out here I still could think only of new life in the abstract. In the flesh, it was beyond my comprehension under the present circumstances, with mass death all around.

I was taken to a wattle hut. In the corner stood a little Chadian boy, a broomstick-like figure, who was suffering from marasmus. He looked just like so many of the famine victims the U.S. audience had become used to seeing on television. In place of sorghum, his mother was boiling herbs in a pot. Beside her, concealed under a coarse blanket, lay the newborn baby, a boy, who, when the blanket was pulled back, looked astonishingly healthy. A relief worker explained that the effects of the mother’s malnutrition were not visible on the child.

But I couldn’t help wondering what was going to happen to that baby. Would he grow up to be as malnourished as his older brother? If, indeed, the baby lived that long. Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia all were embroiled in civil wars that had helped spark famines. What could be the future of such a child, trapped in the soft, sandy center of a fragmenting world?

It is only 45 minutes by plane across the Red Sea choke point of Bab al Mandeb (“The Gate of Lament”), from the tribal turbulence of al-Qaeda–infested Yemen to the sleepy calm and stability of the newly independent Horn of Africa state of Eritrea. While the West promotes democracy, economic development, military demobilization, and the muting of ethnic hatreds as the only path to domestic tranquility, even as it apologizes for its own legacy of colonialism, Eritrea, at least for the moment, provides a rebuke to all that. Eritrea has achieved a degree of noncoercive social discipline and efficiency enviable in the Third World and particularly in Africa, and it has done so by ignoring the West’s advice on democracy and development, by cultivating a sometimes obsessive and narcissistic dislike of its neighbors, and by not demobilizing its 200,000-man army until there are jobs waiting for the troops, even as its leaders are openly grateful for the Italian colonial experience.

While the streets and shops of nearby Yemen—from where I had just come—are plastered with the photos of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose cult of personality is mild compared to those of other Arab and African leaders, one never sees a photo of Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki, the veritable founder of this country, who led a guerrilla movement that wrested independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after a 30-year low-intensity war. “Photos of me would create an air of mystery and distance from the people. It’s the lack of photos that liberates you. I hate high walls and armed guards,” President Afewerki told me. While other leaders in the region live inside forbidding military compounds, President Afewerki lives in a modest suburban-style house, and greeted me in his secretary’s office at the end of an unassuming corridor. He moves about the capital in the passenger seat of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, stopping at red lights, with only one follow car. Western diplomats here say they have seen him disappear into large crowds of Eritreans without any security detail at all. “It’s easy to put a bullet in him and he knows it,” remarked one foreign diplomat.