According to UN World Food Program close to 3 million Sudanese are near starvation and in urgent need of food assistance (AFP). Water and food shortages are most severe in Southern Sudan, but the government has made contradictory claims to this accusation, saying the situation was not alarming (Reuters). In order that our readers be able to judge for themselves, we refer them to two eye witness accounts. The first comes from a member of the Canadian Parliament, who upon his return from Sudan on March, 23, 2001, declared that roughly 1 million people were confronted with starvation in the South and that many of them would die in the coming weeks if food aid wasn’t delivered to them immediately (UPI). The second account concerns northern of Bar el Ghazal and comes from Caesare Mazzorali, Bishop of Rumbeck, who is Italian and one of two foreign Bishops in the country. After flying to various sites in a matter of hours in Aweil, Gogrial and Twic territory, he sent us his report.

In a region of two hundred kilometers from north to south and three hundred kilometers east to west, roughly from Mayen Abum to Nyamell, approximately one million people live the nightmare of not having enough food to eat or water to drink to stay alive ever since they fled the renewed outbreaks of fighting between the Bagarra militias and SPLA troops. These are people who literally have nothing, who have lost all they ever laid claim to. Their houses, their harvests, their tools, along with their kitchen utensils were burned, while their livestock was stolen by the militias. No institution in the International Community has paid attention to their situation: the fact that they are on the brink of death. Very shortly, most of them will be so weak from lack of food that they will be incapable of preparing what the donor agencies will bring to them, as was the case during the famine of 1998. Even now, as night falls the cooking fires in the villages go unlit, simply because there is nothing left to cook. Communal wells and watering holes are inadequate for the number of persons on the ground. There should be minimum of twelve in the area if the population is not to die of thirst or water born diseases due to the overcrowding and contamination of the little water there is. During the past few weeks, violent military skirmishes have caused numerous deaths on both sides and many of the militia troops have lost their horses. Because the persons in this zone are so feeble, they are unable to dig graves deep enough to bury both dead animals and people, and have resorted instead to shallow trenches. When the rainy season arrives, this will be a source of water contamination and inevitable epidemics of diseases such as cholera. I journeyed through this vast area and in the course of my travels, I only saw one humanitarian NGO unloading food at a distribution center. These people, camped in empty clearings, have built small conical structures of straw a meter and a half high and a meter in diameter, to shelter the women and children. Most of the 50,000 souls I came in contact with had abandoned the railroad zone and the front line for the forested region south west of Malwalkon.