Speech #990013510

Without Soviet pressure. Ethiopia may continue to refuse to accept these corridors. and a million children may dieeven though food is only a few miles and a single government away. Unless we get food into these areas. we will continue to witness the flight of tens of thousands of Ethiopian refugees. In recent months. waves of refugees fleeing famine and conflict have poured across the western border of Ethiopia into Sudan. trekking long distances for food and shelterwhich often are aailable in only short supply or not at all at the border camps in Sudan. At the camps I visited in the Kassala area last December. 1.500 refugees were arriving daily. Over 250.000 Ethiopians have entered Sudan since last September. and another 250.000 will likely arrive in the coming months unless food can reach the isolated areas in northern Ethiopia. In Sudan. we must break logjams of a different sort to deal with the twin problems of the growing number of Ethiopian refugees and the spreading drought that is also now threatening 3 to 4 million Sudanese with famine. The international community already has a sufficient mandate. through the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. to assist Sudan with its refugee crisis. Yet the refugees who are risking death to cross the desert to the U.N. camps in eastern Sudan have. all too often. found no food there. The critical situation we saw in December has turned into a disaster in February. As I wrote recently to the U.N. High Commissioner for refugees. I fear that we are witnessing an inexcusable. manmade disaster in eastern Sudan that was. and still is. avoidable. Current reports indicate that in the Wad Sharifie camp alone. the population has doubled in size since October. yet when we were there. U.N. food supplies were based on the outdated October figure. A few days ago 5.000 refugees were at risk. and 50 were dying every daydouble the number when we were there in December. New arrivals in this camp alone reached a level of 400 to 500 a day in January. and over 2.500 a day for all of eastern Sudan. Despite this massive human flood. food supplies have not been commensurately increased. nor have contingency plans been adequate. Yet Port Sudan on the Red Sea is only 4 hours north by truck from Kassala. While we were at Wad Sharifie. we learned that a ship with 500.000 tons of grain had been waiting for weeks at the port caught in a bureaucratic controversy over whether the cargo should be warehoused in Khartoum or diverted to Kassala for refugee relief. I have never seen a more graphic demonstration of the truth that redtape kills. The dimensions of the refugee disaster in Sudan are irrefutable. As a result of bureaucratic delays in the past. more food. more shelter and more medicine will have to be airlifted at great costwhen more effective earlier action could have shipped it by sea for far less cost and saved more lives. Mr.