Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On famine crimes and tragedies

2008; Elsevier BV; Volume: 372; Issue: 9649 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(08)61641-4

1474-547X

Alex de Waal,

Health and Conflict Studies

The small town of Kailak lies on the southern slopes of Darfur's Jebel Marra massif that rises from the surrounding savanna to a height of 10 000 feet. It was once a prosperous if modest market town, where farmers sold millet and fruit to merchants from the nearby city of Nyala. But for 8 weeks in 2004, Kailak achieved the ugly distinction of becoming the site of a massacre by starvation. Militiamen and soldiers torched the surrounding villages, forcing 17 000 people to flee to the town. Then the armed men surrounded the makeshift camp and stopped anyone leaving. They robbed families of their possessions and beat or shot them if they foraged for food in the remains of their homes or gathered roots and berries in the woodlands. An age-old siege tactic was applied to a defenceless civilian population. From February to April, 2004, the people who congregated in Kailak suffered that rarest of conditions, outright starvation. The verb to starve is commonly misused to refer to all people who suffer and die in famines, but in fact almost all those who succumb do so on account of outbreaks of infectious diseases. The pathetically thin children we see in pictures of feeding centres are usually suffering diarrhoea or fever or a combination of the two. It is uncommon for children to become severely malnourished because of lack of food alone, and exceptionally rare for adults to die of frank starvation. But there is no mistaking when a population suffers this scourge. 30 years ago, commenting on the transition to widespread starvation in the midst of an Ethiopian famine, the late John Rivers, pioneering epidemiologist of disaster, compared it to freezing water turning into ice. In Kailak, a visiting UN team found that overall death rates were more than 40 times what they considered an “emergency” threshold. They wrote of “a strategy of systematic and deliberate starvation”. Kailak's extreme is rare but not unique. The famine camp at Korem in Ethiopia, made infamous by the 1984 BBC newsreel that sparked Bob Geldof to launch BandAid, was created by a counterinsurgency that used food as a weapon against a civilian population suspected of supporting a rebellion. In Sudan, in the summer of 1988, displaced villagers from southern Sudan died at even higher rates in camps just across the internal border in north Sudan. They too had been burned and terrorised out of their villages and restricted to camps by militiamen. The Somali famine of 1992 was the product of militiamen stripping villagers of every morsel of food and shred of clothing. In famine epidemiology, the verb to starve is transitive—like wounding or murder, it is something that people do to one another. In such cases, dispensing food seems a pitifully insufficient response, merely clearing up the human debris while the demolition contractor continues his work. Should not such cases of famine be classified as crimes? Should they not be dealt with in the same manner as massacres perpetrated by bullets or bombardment? These questions preoccupied me for a decade after the 1980s famines in Ethiopia and Sudan. I paid some attention to how the relevant articles of the Geneva Conventions should be applied, or expanded upon, and whether a new protocol for “famine crimes” should be introduced. Article 54 of the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva Conventions (1977) prohibited destroying materials essential for the survival of the civilian population (Article 14 in the Second Additional Protocol, which covers internal conflicts). Although not sufficiently comprehensive for my liking—I would have liked it to include prohibitions on activities essential for survival, such as cultivation and foraging—it was theoretically enough to launch a prosecution and set a precedent. Similarly, the clause in Article 5 of the Genocide Convention, which prohibits inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, can be taken to outlaw deliberate starvation. But the main issue wasn't the law, it was finding a body ready to prosecute a famine crime. I should re-emphasise our focus upon outright starvation and hunger and food crises in general. Widespread famines arise from a different form of political malfeasance. Amartya Sen has famously commented that famines do not arise in countries with a free press and democratic elections. His insight arose from comparing India with China. Post-independence India escaped large-scale famine, whereas China suffered the 20th-century's most disastrous famine. During Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958–61), about 30 million people died from the compounded effects of disastrous agricultural policies, natural calamities, and the complete refusal of the government to respond to the crisis. Such indifference to disaster was inconceivable in India, Sen argued, where the free press, elected politicians, and trade unions would have impelled the government to react. Some advocates of liberal democracy have turned Sen's remark into a mantra. But Sen was not arguing for political liberalism as a panacea for socioeconomic ills. True to his demographic data, Sen points out that China's communist health-care system had by the 1980s won life expectancy gains that meant that, year on year, 3 million fewer Chinese died than Indians. Why, he asked, did chronic poverty and ill health not spark the same political action in New Delhi as did famine? Sen might also have added that stigmatised minorities often suffer food insecurity despite liberalism at the centre of power. Indian governments responded with alacrity to threats of famine partly because of a political tradition that identified famine with discrediting government, creating a social contract against famine. Famines caused by government error, exclusion, or inaction have recurred in Africa, although contemporary African famines kill only a small fraction of the numbers that died in the great Asian and eastern European famines of the 20th century. Remedy demands not criminal prosecution but democratic accountability. Electoral calling to account for rulers who have failed to feed their people cannot be expected for wartime governments or dictatorships, which are typically those that engineer frank starvation. In such cases, famine isn't a mistake, it's a policy. And based on the laws of war, there's a knock-down case for treating starvation as a crime. For 10 years, this is what I urged. Be careful what you wish for. In July, 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, sought an arrest warrant for President Bashir, arguing that he was perpetrating genocide against displaced Darfurians. The death rate from violence is low in Darfur today. So Ocampo invoked the clause in the Genocide Convention that prohibits inflicting conditions calculated to destroy groups in whole or part. One problem with the Prosecutor's charge is empirical: Kailak is the only case in Darfur for which there is good evidence for a policy of starvation. But Ocampo generalises to the entire 2·5 million displaced people. Remarks attributed to army commanders about allowing people to die of hunger and thirst in the desert will not stand up as evidence in court. Any forced displacement in a poor country with a bad health service will inevitably cause increased mortality, but—however tragically predictable these deaths may be—it would be a stretch to describe these as acts of genocide. In fact, Darfur's displaced camps have been the locus of one of the most remarkable relief efforts of modern times, which has brought mortality levels down to normal with a speed that would have been considered miraculous even 20 years ago. There are still fluctuations in malnutrition rates and occasional (poorly measured) spikes in death rates, but the big public-health story from Darfur is a successful effort at containing a mortality crisis. By equating eight exceptionally horrific weeks in Kailak with the general experience of displacement, Ocampo demonstrates the perils of allowing an ambitious but epidemiologically illiterate prosecutor loose on the criminology of humanitarian crisis. But my biggest quarrel with the real-time criminalisation of starvation is the fact that it would make humanitarian work inoperable. The same military commanders who are responsible for death also preside over life. Humanitarian work is a struggle to ameliorate the intolerable and to manage conflicts between principles. If the relief workers who visited Kailak or Korem had been set on criminal investigation they would never have got there in the first place, let alone cut the deals with army officers that allowed them to bring food, medicine, and sanitation to the afflicted. Days after the UN mission arrived in Kailak, the local authorities agreed to relocate the camp and allow relief agencies to serve it. Earlier in the war, one aid worker called a similar exercise “supping with the devil”; the UN preferred “gradually upgraded modus operandi”. Described bluntly or euphemistically, negotiated amelioration is the life saver for people threatened by deliberate starvation. A quarter century ago, many relief workers preferred to turn a blind eye to the criminal acts that generated humanitarian crises. Their successors today are more politically attuned, but are well advised not to translate informed moral outrage into ardour for prosecuting famine criminals. There's no doubt that extremes of deliberate starvation are crimes and humanitarian workers should be aware of the law. But humanitarians need to tread a fine line, reminding themselves why discretion is one of the fundamental principles guiding the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross. When one set of rights is deaf to the moral claims of another, the result can be tragedy. Justice should wait until lives have been saved.