Slaughter In Slow Motion

The rains have been plentiful, and the sorghum is growing. Still, in southern Sudan the old, the young and the weak are dying of starvation: a frail child is barely able to share a meager meal with his father at a feeding center; a desperately weak man stares at a bowl of water; another is huddled by the remains of a fire with a packet of rehydration salts. As earlier in Ethiopia and Somalia, this famine is in part the result of civil war. Initially the fighting pitted the Muslim government in Khartoum against Christian rebels in the south; now the rebels are also killing one another. No one knows how many are starving, but in a cycle of hatred and revenge, peace is not in sight, nor is an end to hunger.