The World - News from Dec. 26, 1988

Both the Sudanese government and rebel forces have sought to manipulate Western assistance for starving civilians in southern Sudan, according to a U.S. Senate staff mission that visited Khartoum and the war zones. “Not since Biafra have both sides used food so cynically as a weapon of war,” said Jerry Tinker, staff director of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration and refugee affairs, referring to the West African civil war that ended in 1970. The Senate team talked to leaders of the Sudanese government and of the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army in Ethiopia to try to persuade them to allow more food into southern Sudan, where war has displaced or threatened with starvation nearly half of the region’s 6 million people.