Bangladesh needs bailing outagain. The cyclone that tore into the southeastern coast last week was the worst storm to hit the nation in two decades. Winds up to 145 mph drove a 20-foot-high tidal wall of water over a dozen low-lying islands and onto the mainland. When the waters receded, more than 125,000 people were dead and some 9 million left homeless. No one had seen destruction on such a terrifying scale since the 1970 cyclone, and the famine that followed, which killed between 300,000 and 1 million people. The storm’s havoc, flooding more than 20,000 square miles, hobbled relief efforts. Six Bangladeshi Air Force helicopters worked dawn to dusk dropping food, water-purification tablets, medicines and rehydration salts. But supplies were reaching only a fraction of the victims. Meanwhile, international aid trickled in. The European Community ponied up $12 million; Japan pledged and the United States released $2 million each and an additional $100,000 to private agencies, many already stretched to the snapping point by efforts to ease catastrophes elsewhere.
Disaster is never far away in the Third World. But it was rare for it to strike three separate regions at once. Concern for the fate of Bangladesh competed last week with fears for the 1.5 million Kurdish refugees displaced in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War (page 42). And both submerged an even deeper dilemma: the plight of sub-Saharan Africa, where 29 million people face death from starvation and civil war in what Save the Children, a relief agency, calls “the worst famine in Africa in living memory.” There isn’t enough money, manpower or sympathy to go around. “People worldwide must have the feeling of, ‘African famine again?”’ says Dr. Tatsuo Hayashi of the Japan International Volunteer Center in Tokyo. “Press reports, if ever made, are losing value as news these days.”
What accounts for the tepid response? Some factors are perennial: lack of awareness, an absence of national self-interest, a shortage of resources. But needy causes must now reckon with a recent factor: donor fatigue. Besieged by so many appeals, people grow weary of giving, particularly if they’ve already dug into their pockets for a cause, only to see the trouble continue. Endemic problems, like famine in Sudan and Ethiopia, or seemingly uncontrollable ones, like cyclones and earthquakes, stand little chance of sustained public compassion and support.
But a one-shot catastrophe-Iraqi refugees, say - can rivet a nation’s attention and cause an outpouring of support. Once President Bush finally decided to help the Kurds, nothing got in the way. Not the logistical problems of supplying and moving hundreds of thousands of people down from the mountains. Not even the political quagmire of interfering with another country’s sovereignty. Never mind that the Kurds had tried and failed to get international support for 70 years. Their abortive uprising against Saddam Hussein earned them their hour on the world’s stage. In just two weeks, $188 million in relief poured in from the United States. Guilt had something to do with the largesse; Americans felt remorse that the United States hadn’t come to the aid of their rebellion. So did publicity, which galvanized the public and forced the president’s hand. Thanks to the news media, the face of grieving Kurdish refugees replaced the beaming smiles of victorious GIs.
Africans haven’t been so lucky. Drought and civil war in Sudan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Liberia and Somalia have created dire food shortages for more than 19 million people, most of them peasants. But for the most part this famine has not captured the attention of the world press. Journalists already visited this tragedy, during the sub-Saharan famine from 1984 to 1985 that took more than a million lives. Rock stars threw benefit concerts to help raise almost $300 million in relief aid. That the problem has returned full force might seem a slap in the face of philanthropy. “Donors are tired of repetitious events, and Sudan and Ethiopia are repetitious,” says a CARE official in Nairobi.
Donor impatience also springs from false expectations of quick fixes. If famine were an accident of nature, it could be overcome. But nature doesn’t cause famine; it only exacerbates it. Famine is a result of war, which drains a nation of precious resources needed for agricultural development. Too often, it is the product of dictatorial government, of corruption or overcentralized economic policy. Or it could be the byproduct of international politics: in Sudan earlier this year, at just the time a massive relief effort should have been getting started, Khartoum ignored repeated warnings of famine by relief agencies. Belligerence led to paralysis. Western donors, disdainful of Sudan’s repressive regime and fearful that unconditional food aid would be diverted to the Army, were reluctant to act. Sudan’s support for Iraq in the gulf crisis compounded the problem. “Anybody who tells you that politics has nothing to do with humanitarian aid is way off the wall,” says a senior Western relief official in Khartoum. The people dying, however, are not the politicians. “Some of them don’t even know the government exists,” says Zeinab Abusham, a relief worker for CARE in Sudan. “They want something to eat, that’s all.”
Up to 300,000 people will die of starvation in Sudan this year, say aid officials in Khartoum, despite a relief effort that is finally underway. The United Nations World Food Program estimates the country needs 1.3 million tons of emergency grain to feed more than 7 million hungry people. So far, donors have pledged half that amount and delivered only 148,000 tons of food. Until recently, Sudan’s military government refused to appeal for help. “It’s not serious, not serious at all,” Col. Muhammed Amin Khalifa, an officer in the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, insisted in January. Meanwhile, thousands of children perished in parched villages stretching from the Red Sea in the east to Darfur province in the west. Ironically, Sudan could feed itself-and export food to the neighboring Middle East-since less than half of the country’s 66 million acres of arable land are being cultivated. Instead, the mostly Muslim leadership is spending $1 million a day fighting animist and Christian rebels.
Can shocking pictures of suffering, which elicited so much charity in 1984, save those at risk in Africa and the Subcontinent this time? Images are stopgap measures, at best; and their repetition breeds indifference. Back in 1980, the Brandt Commission warned that the growing gap between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, the rich and the poor, would lead to political and economic chaos on a global scale. The report urged world leaders to put aside their differences and act on “mutual interests in the field of peace, justice and jobs.” Eleven years later, it still sounds like a good prescription for treating donor fatigue.
As the Bangladesh death toll mounted last week, NEWSWEEK’S Ron Moreau flew over the devastated island of Kutubdia, one of the areas hardest hit by the storm. His report:
Crammed with 4.5 tons of bread in burlap sacks, the turboprop transport skimmed over Kutubdia Island. Dead cattle dotted the paddies. The broken hulks of fishing boats lay in fields more than a mile from the Bay of Bengal coastline. All that was left of most farms were small groves of leafless, twisted trees that once shaded a thatched house. But there were survivors-tens of thousands of shocked and half-naked villagers. They scrambled wildly across the paddies as the precious parcels fell from the plane’s open cargo door and hit the muddy water.
Most of them had eaten next to nothing in the five days since a 20-foot tidal wave swept over Kutubdia and at least 11 other islands. One helicopter that landed on Kutubdia was mobbed. Old women who fell to their knees to beg for food were quickly shoved out of the way by stronger villagers. They ripped some parcels to shreds in the fight for bread, precious water and medicine. Policemen beat back the crowd with sticks to allow the chopper to take off.
Villagers on nearby Sandwip Island said they buried hundreds of victims in mass graves. But they refuse to approach the distended bodies still washing ashore. Orphaned children wander around the debris of their homes looking for something to eat or drink. Officials estimate that more than 30,000 of the 264,000 farmers and fishermen who lived there perished.
The 40 tons of relief supplies that the government’s small transport fleet can deliver daily is only a fraction of what is needed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cyclone victims. And with much of the devastated region still flooded, some relief packages simply sink without a trace. But at least the villagers are getting something.
In addition to the fleet of Soviet-built AN-32 planes, all six serviceable Air Force helicopters have joined the relief effort. But ships are hampered by the fact that the storm washed away docks and jetties on the islands. Relief supplies cannot be off loaded in the country’s main port, Chittagong, because eight ships sank there.
The survivors face a dismal future in this luckless nation, ravaged by cycles of flood and drought. Their rice crop was obliterated. Three quarters of their livestock died. The cyclone smashed warehouses containing emergency food stocks. It washed out roads and bridges, and severed electrical lines. It disabled the main satellite ground station. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, 46, Bangladesh’s first woman leader, estimated the damage at $1.42 billion. The death toll could reach 150,000. Officials say they need $56 million in supplies at once to keep thousands more from succumbing to starvation and disease.
Appalling though it was, the devastation could have been even worse, The winds peaked during low tide; high water would have magnified the waves’ force. The government broadcast repeated warnings of the storm’s approach. Bangladesh’s Red Crescent Society organized 20,000 volunteers to coax people to safer locations. Warnings also went out over village loudspeakers. The alluvial plain offers no real refuge for hundreds of miles; still, officials said 3 million people made it to safety.
Those who remained could do little. “It was much worse than I could have imagined,” said Preben Basse, the leader of a cyclone protection project at the sea resort of Cox’s Bazar, near the Myanmar border. “Throughout the night I heard people scream. In the morning, a trail of devastation was all around.”
Some faulted the government for not ordering an outright evacuation. But there will be time enough for secondguessing. For now, the task is to contain the suffering.
