by Adam Fifield
Dodge agreed. He had, in fact, already been meeting with the country’s prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi, on a regular basis to discuss what was possible in the south. UNICEF always operates at the invitation of a country’s sitting government, and the government of Sudan only allowed it to work in the north. The south was off the radar and off the table.
But Dodge had managed to work out an unofficial agreement with the prime minister and the rebels to allow aid flights to some towns in the south (not including Abyei), starting as early as 1987. It was based on “implied consent” and was a “tumultuous arrangement and affair because both sides were suspicious,” according to Dodge. If Khartoum thought Dodge was getting too cozy with the SPLA, he could be declared persona non grata (or PNG’d) and kicked out of the country (this had recently happened to another UN official). The flights also earned the ire of four foreign ambassadors, who complained to the UN secretary general that UNICEF was acting unilaterally.
This didn’t faze Grant. “Jim was on the side of risk-taking and of things on the edge,” says Dodge. “The mission was more important than niceties and regulations.” Grant’s main concern about the flights was insurance. “The normal insurance was carried out of New York, and they wouldn’t touch it at all,” Dodge notes. Grant told him to approach Lloyd’s of London. Dodge did, and the company gave him some quotes for covering the dicey endeavor. When Dodge sent the quotes to senior officials at UNICEF headquarters in New York, he was told not to proceed. “New York said, ‘No way, José,’ ” he recalls. “But it was Jim who said, ‘Yes, we’re going to do it.’ ”
But Grant still wanted a formal, on-the-books agreement with all sides. He asked Dodge to get official letters from the rebels, the government, and the ICRC (with whom UNICEF would be cooperating and which had also been trying to gain permission to deliver aid to the north and south). The letters from the rebels and the Red Cross came fairly easily; the government was a different story. After the complaints made against Dodge by members of the diplomatic community, rumors lurched around Khartoum that he and UNICEF were playing too fast and loose. “It was very edgy,” says Dodge.
When he met with al-Mahdi, the prime minister (with whom Dodge had a personal relationship) refused his extended hand. He accused Dodge of aiding his enemies and prolonging the war. Something had soured him. How could Dodge possibly get him to sign a letter of consent now?
He went back to al-Mahdi’s office four or five times but could not get past his secretary. Then an idea elbowed its way into his head: his friend from the World Bank played tennis with the prime minister—maybe he could snag al-Mahdi’s signature. Miraculously, he did just that, and handed the signed letter back to Dodge. He called Grant immediately and blurted out, “I have it!”
The signed letter, along with an agreement finally obtained by the ICRC from the government, helped set the stage for what would become a colossal, precedent-breaking humanitarian endeavor known as Operation Lifeline Sudan. It would last sixteen years and involve several UN agencies and more than thirty-five nongovernmental organizations. Dodge left the country before it began. Grant posted him to Bangladesh, where he would help engineer a “near miracle” in immunization coverage over the next several years.
Palm was soon summoned to New York. A mid-level UNICEF employee, the unassuming German was nervous about meeting UNICEF’s executive director. He bought a tie for the occasion but did not know how to knot it; he had never worn one before. A New York shopkeeper knotted it for him. In front of Grant and several senior staff members, Palm gave his logistical assessment of what was possible in the south of Sudan and how many locations UNICEF could reach. Grant eased his nerves and then said, “We’re going official with this.”
Palm flew back to Nairobi, Kenya, where he was based. Within a week, he learned that Grant had put $1 million at his disposal. He immediately began procuring vaccines, food, and other supplies for the starving children of Sudan.
Grant wanted to see Abyei for himself. It was a big security risk—airplanes flying in the area sometimes returned with bullet holes in their tails. In 1986 and 1987, according to the Associated Press, rebel fighters shot down two relief planes, killing seventy people. Dodge had been fired on twice while in the air. But Grant insisted on going.
Once on the ground, “he was very shaken by what he saw,” says Abdul Mohammed, an emergency coordinator for the Sudan Council of Churches who accompanied Grant and would later join the staff of UNICEF.
Walking into the village, Grant took in the scene and muttered, “Oh my God.” The situation was probably grimmer than anything he had ever witnessed, save maybe the Great Bengal Famine in 1944.
The famine’s toll in southern Sudan was “worse than the famous Korem camp (in Ethiopia) in ’84,” says Alex de Waal, an Africa researcher and executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. “It was worse than anything” that had been recorded before, he adds, noting that the death rates in Abyei and El Meiram in 1988 were four to five times higher than those in the Korem camp.
Grant quickly overcame his shock, removed his jacket, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He rubbed his hands together vigorously—as if to say, Okay, let’s fix this. He fished out a camera and started snapping photos of the sunken-eyed, wasted children. He sat down with mothers and asked them when their children were last fed. “He transformed himself from being shocked to being affectionate,” says Mohammed.
One woman pleaded with him in whispers, grabbing his hand and pulling him into a hut with a plastic tarp roof. Inside lay a tiny baby girl, maybe eighteen months old. Her belly distended, her eyes empty, her arms the width of Magic Markers, the child was on the cusp of death. She cried weakly. When greeting people in their homes, Grant would often cheerfully ask, “How are we today?” Inside the hut he knelt down. He took the child’s limp hand and spoke softly to her. He may have said he was sorry. Then he stood and either took the mother’s hand or placed his hand on her shoulder; she was despondent, her eyes vacant—“eyes that have seen a lot,” says Mohammed. There were a few other children inside. Grant told a UNICEF staffer to hurry and get a doctor, though he knew it was likely too late. This baby needed more than ORS. He waited for the doctor to arrive and examine the child. Mohammed does not know what happened to her.
UN secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar needed someone to helm the entire UN emergency response in Sudan, a startlingly complicated and increasingly urgent task that required wooing donors and the media and commanding the respect of the government and the rebels. An earlier UN effort to deliver aid to the south of the country, called Operation Rainbow, had been shut down shortly after it began in 1986; the government had discovered the man coordinating it had been speaking to the rebels and expelled him from the country. As a result, many were pessimistic about future initiatives. “That basically intimidated the UN,” says de Waal. What was needed, he adds, was “someone who was not going to be intimidated.”
Within the UN system at the time, the choice was obvious—especially since Grant and Dodge had begun to lay some of the groundwork. After Grant had accepted, he ran into a colleague on a plane and asked him whether he thought he could succeed. The man told him he stood a good chance. “People are saying I have a 25 percent chance,” Grant replied. “I think I will.”
Grant knew the only way he could prevail was to persuade the entrenched, warring parties in Sudan to lay down their arms. He needed to reprise the Days of Tranquillity from El Salvador. This time, it would be even more difficult. Donor government representatives and diplomatic leaders had already tried and failed to prod the government into action. One question scampering skittishly around the nooks and alleys of the aid and diplomatic community in Sudan: What makes Jim Grant think he can do it?
The chances were improved by a changed political climate in Sudan in early 1989, according to de Waal. Sadiq al-Mahdi had long stubbornly resisted the prospect of a peace process, but his stance had recently been softened by new pressure f
rom political parties in Sudan and from the United States government. This, says de Waal, “made it possible for all sorts of things to happen on the humanitarian front.” As for Operation Lifeline, he says, “it took someone like Jim Grant to make the international [community] take seriously the need and the possibility to do it, but it was these two other political developments that opened the door.”
In early March, Grant met with the swaggering al-Mahdi. Standing six feet one and taking four-foot strides, al-Mahdi was an affable and imperious man who wore flowing white robes and a white burnoose on his head. A former president of the Oxford Union, he liked intellectual discussions.
After a tense exchange, during which al-Mahdi initially swatted away Grant’s concerns, he eventually gave in to the UNICEF chief’s request. In his written account, Reid recalled that one turning point in the discussion came when al-Mahdi said that Grant’s gruesome projections of starvation in South Sudan sounded “worse than Ethiopia” and added “that can’t be true.”
Grant had replied, “It is worse than Ethiopia.”
That rattled the prime minister.
Once Grant had al-Mahdi’s agreement, he went to see the stocky, imposing president of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. John Garang was a member of the Dinka tribe but had attended Grinnell College in Iowa and reportedly had traces of a Midwestern accent. He wore green fatigues and a green cap.
They met under a mango tree in the desert, sitting on folding chairs in a circle of about twenty people. According to Reid, when Grant asked Garang how many children he had, the question drew laughter from the rebel leader’s brusque bodyguards. But Grant cheerfully persisted: “You have four million!” He told Garang he was the “father of all the children here.”
Within a few days, Garang provided his answer: yes.
Reid was in the meetings with al-Mahdi and Garang and watched his boss win them both over. “It was amazing,” he says, “how Jim had caused two mighty oaks to fall in just a few strokes.”
Operation Lifeline Sudan was officially launched on April 1, 1989, a $132 million endeavor to transport more than one hundred thousand tons of food to millions of people in the south. The food had to be delivered before the imminent start of the rainy season, which would hamper travel and make some areas impassable. At a press conference, Grant said that the effort was a “race against time … a mission impossible that could be possible with the cooperation of everybody.”
A month later, after the rainy season had begun and progress had been slower than Grant had hoped, he sat in a hot Khartoum conference room glaring at the general whose armed gangs, he believed, had attacked his train.
After admonishing the general—not by name, but by implication—he let the silence spread through the room; he let everyone bake in it, squirm in it.
Then he announced that the train would resume its run.
“If you know anyone else that wants to try to stop this train,” he declared forcefully, “tell them, ‘Hands off! Hands off!’ Or we’ll shine the headlights of the world on them.”
The general was “completely terrified,” says Farid Rahman, a Pakistani who had recently replaced Dodge as UNICEF’s Sudan representative. “He was an aggressive man,” Rahman notes, “and he had a tribal mentality, and I think he was feeling affronted, here was a train that was going to go through his territory all the way to the south.”
Rahman recalls the general brazenly speaking up at some earlier point. “He said, ‘We can’t guarantee the safety of this train’ … which was, in a way, saying the whole train project is going to fail.”
But after Grant’s indignant speech, “he absolutely shut up.”
In two days, the train was moving again, and the food reached those starving in the south.
Setbacks continued, including attacks on convoys by raiding militias accountable to neither side. Grant visited a Red Cross tent hospital where seven or eight UNICEF volunteer drivers from Kenya lay on gurneys recovering from burns and AK47 bullet wounds. Their convoy had been hit, and they had all miraculously survived. But their injuries were severe, and several groaned in pain.
Grant walked slowly into the wide, white tent and bent down to speak to each of them. He thanked them for risking their lives to save children. Tears stood in his eyes as he made his way among the gurneys—an uncommon display of emotion. Most of the men were too weak to speak, but a few recognized Grant, and their eyes widened. One man reached out and touched his arm.
“He was very much like a priest,” says Reid, who accompanied him. “He was very much in communion with them.”
Lifeline gained momentum and supporters, and aid began to flow along the eight corridors of tranquillity. Prime Minister al-Mahdi became increasingly enthusiastic about the effort, spending more and more time on it. One June 29, he met with Grant and Reid for eighty minutes.
The next day, everything changed. On the morning of June 30, Reid heard a knock on his door at the Khartoum Hilton. He opened it and saw two stern armed guards. Perplexed, Reid protested, “I was hoping to go out and have some breakfast.”
The guards told him he was not to leave his room and that they would bring him food. Reid called Grant, who was also staying at the Hilton.
“Have you looked outside?” Jim asked. “It looks like we’ve had a coup.”
“Oh, God,” was Reid’s reply.
Grant sounded calm, not at all panicked. At some point that morning, Rahman had told him about the coup—that Sadiq al-Mahdi had been arrested and a general, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, had taken power. It was bloodless; no one had been killed. Rahman had also said that the new leaders had specifically requested Grant’s presence at a meeting later that day, at which a member of the new government would address the diplomatic corps. And then Rahman had strongly advised his boss not to go.
“As the special representative of the secretary general … you would be giving them a tacit recognition of their illegal act,” said Rahman, who was efficient, by-the-book, and more cautious than his predecessor, Cole Dodge. “I will go.”
Grant agreed. Rahman left; he was allowed to move about. Grant, Reid, and two other staff staying at the Hilton were apparently under “semi house arrest,” says Rahman.
They stayed in their rooms. Outside, it was eerily quiet. Reid got the impression that Grant was “beavering away” on something, so he didn’t bother him. The question that now hung ominously before them—the question that must have pried its way to the top of Jim’s teeming list of priorities—was this: With Sadiq al-Mahdi no longer in power, what happens to Operation Lifeline Sudan?
They would soon find out.
Rahman went to the diplomatic meeting; it was uneventful. The new leader, al-Bashir, did not make an appearance. Afterward, an official of the new government called Rahman. He had a message for Jim Grant—would Mr. Grant like to meet al-Bashir? Without consulting Grant, Rahman immediately said no. The head of UNICEF was “not very keen” on meeting with al-Bashir, he told the man. Then Rahman turned the question around: if the president would like to see Mr. Grant, Mr. Grant might consider that request.
Soon Rahman got another message: yes, President al-Bashir would like to meet Mr. Grant.
Rahman, Reid, Grant, and a few other staff members got ready to meet Sudan’s new president—the very first delegation to do so. Reid recalls being led out of his room by armed guards. They weren’t rough, but they weren’t friendly either. When they got to the street, he spotted Grant sitting in a military jeep. A flag jutted from the fender. Reid got in. He doesn’t remember exactly what Grant said next, but he thinks it may have been a half joke: “This should be an interesting ride, Richard.”
A convoy, including several jeeps and UNICEF’s official vehicle—a Toyota Crown Royal Saloon—ferried the group through a hushed Khartoum. During the bumpy, ten-minute ride, Grant said little if anything. He seemed preoccupied, watching the buildings and streets trundle by.
The jeep stopped in front of a run-down, inconspicuous
government building. The guards helped them out, led them up the steps, and opened the doors. They were ushered into a “small, dingy room,” recalls Rahman. Then they were led into another spare room. There was a table with papers strewn across it.
Behind the table stood a small, tense, sallow man in a rumpled military uniform that appeared to have been worn for several days. Stubble coated his face. Grant smiled broadly as he introduced his group. The man finally sat down, Reid recalls, and then they sat down. He greeted them in a friendly but official manner. Three other men stood nearby. “Shaggy-looking fellows,” says Rahman. “Highly unimpressive.”
This was Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, the country’s new leader. A decade and a half later, his name would be synonymous with the appallingly bloody violence and crimes against humanity in the Darfur region of Sudan; in 2008, he would become the first sitting head of state to receive an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court in The Hague. As they stood before him on that quiet night in June 1989, Reid feared al-Bashir was about to shut down Operation Lifeline.
Stern and speaking decent English, he told them that he knew what they were doing, he was aware of the relief campaign. He asked if it was worth all of the effort, and if it really did anything for the country, according to Reid.
Grant’s response was to make the same pitch he had made to rebel leader John Garang.
“Mr. President, how many children do you have?”
It is unclear how, or even whether, al-Bashir answered.
Grant provided one for him, saying something like: “You have millions of children! You have become the father of all the children in Sudan.”
Al-Bashir’s elbows were resting on the arms of his chair, recalls Reid, and he shifted his position after Grant’s proclamation. He looked uncomfortable.
“He was completely stupefied,” says Rahman. “Here is this general right from the bush who had a coup that very day and was probably totally bewildered.”
