Twice a day the monotony and stultifying doldrums of this overpacked camp of 12,000 Mozambican refugees is broken by the arrival of three big tanker trucks.
The trucks enter the camp bumping over rutted, dusty roads after a three- hour drive from Mangoche, a Malawian district administrative center 35 miles away. As the trucks come into the camp, refugees stream out of their makeshift huts and hastily form orderly lines. The trucks have brought the rarest, most precious commodity imaginable-fresh drinking water.
Dressed in rags and mostly barefoot, the Mozambicans stand patiently under an interminably hot sun awaiting their carefully measured and recorded water ration for the day. It amounts to about one quart per person.
The ration, meager as it is, is the best the Malawi government and international relief organizations have been able to manage at the camp since the Mozambicans arrived more than a year ago. It is not enough. The lack of water has caused an average of six deaths a day.
Usually the victims are children who die of dehydration despite efforts to bring them back to health through makeshift rehydration clinics. There is simply too little water to go around.
Two wells have been drilled at the camp, but they remain capped and unused for lack of pumps. The lack of water was compounded by the failure of seasonal rains last November. Even though rain would assure local farmers of a harvest next April, George Pheleni, a Malawian district official who oversees the camp in this remote area along Malawi`s eastern border with Mozambique, almost hoped for a drought.
”The food supplies we have aren`t enough, but we are able to truck in enough so that there is no starvation,” Pheleni said.
”If it starts to rain, whatever food and water we truck to the camps will disappear. The roads will be impassable.
”We have not had the resources to properly prepare the camps. There is no sanitation system, so if the rains come this year, it will be a disaster. There will be widespread diarrhea because of the lack of sanitation, and people will die. If the situation is not taken care of, there could be the danger of epidemics such as typhoid.”
Early in December the rain began. Pheleni`s dilemma is repeated up and down Malawi`s 300-mile border with Mozambique. In the last 16 months 400,000 Mozambicans have fled into tiny, land-locked Malawi. They continue to pour in at a rate of 20,000 a month, escaping a bloody civil war.
The influx of so many refugees could not have come at a worse time for Malawians. Two years of drought and insect infestations have ravaged the nation`s economy. With 85 percent of the nation`s 7 million people surviving on subsistence farming in the best of times, the poor harvests in the last two years have caused widespread hunger and illness among Malawians themselves.
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The war in Mozambique also has cut the road and rail links Malawi has historically depended upon to bring in imported food and goods from Mozambican seaports. Most anything Malawi now needs to import is routed overland in a circuitous 2,000-mile trip from South Africa through Zimbabwe and Zambia. It has more than doubled the cost of anything imported, at an awful cost to Malawians who, with a $200 per capita annual income, are among the poorest people in Africa.
Even the overland route is now proving inadequate to carry enough food to make up for Malawi`s current food shortages.
The United Nations is importing 950 metric tons of corn every week to feed the 400,000 refugees, only about half the amount needed to adequately nourish so many people, said one international relief official.
Transport difficulties and inadequate supplies from neighboring countries, also suffering from drought, have blocked efforts to bring in larger amounts of food, he said. Meanwhile, refugees continue to stream into Malawi, drawing down food stocks and jeopardizing food supplies for Malawians themselves.
He said he fears that Malawi soon will face starvation on the scale of Ethiopia unless the world community responds with increased aid.
”There are 625,000 Malawians already affected by drought and insect infestation, and they will be at risk until the March-April harvests in 1988,” the official said.
”If you combine the number of Malawians at risk with 400,000 refugees, you are looking at 1 million people in this country in desperate need of food.”
The food shortages in Malawi are worrisome for a country that was generally considered food self-sufficient and prided itself on running a free- market economy free of international debt since its independence from Britain in 1964.
Now it appears Malawi may be sliding into a status similar to Ethiopia, that of a chronically food-short nation that will in the future depend heavily on international assistance to avoid famine. With a 2.4 percent annual birthrate, Malawi has become one of the most densely populated nations in Africa. The size of Pennsylvania, it has less than one acre of arable land per person, and most farm land is only marginally productive.
The country has one of the highest child mortality rates in the world. In Malawi 151 children out of 1,000 die in their first year, and 320 out of 1,000 die before reaching age 5.
Child malnutrition rates in the rural areas are among the highest in the world, with 55 percent of the children under 5 showing symptoms of chronic malnourishment. In some parts of the country the rate is as high as 65 percent.
International aid and development officials have praised the government for its efforts to face up to its fundamental problems in recent years. But the vast influx of refugees into the country, along with drought and insect infestations, has turned a monumental problem into an impossible one, at least for the near future.
”The refugees are camping out on farm fields, taking already very limited land out of production,” one aid official said. ”They are cutting down wood for fuel and accelerating deforestation and degradation of land, creating long-term problems for the government.
”The health concerns the refugees bring with them are very serious for Malawi. Few of the Mozambicans are covered by inoculations when they arrive here, and only 40 percent of all Malawians are fully covered with
inoculations.
”The government health services responded magnificently to the refugees, diverting much of the country`s primary health care resources to them. But that has compounded the problems of an already inadequate health care system for Malawians. There are only 18 Malawian doctors in the country and very few trained health workers.”
Most of the Mozambicans in Malawi come from places within a day`s walk of the border and are interrelated with Malawians by family and tribe. The Malawians have welcomed refugees into their villages and have fed them from meager family and village food stocks until government and international aid began to arrive.
Whether Malawi`s good will can continue remains to be seen. International agencies working with the refugees are using long-term plans for caring for the Mozambicans for the next five years. The Malawi government, perhaps more realistically, is making plans to care for them for at least the next 10 years, as no immediate solution to Mozambique`s internal problems is in sight. The refugees are escaping the murder and mayhem that is sweeping across Mozambique in the form of a seemingly aimless, mindless rebellion against the Mozambican government by an insurgent group calling itself the Mozambican National Resistance, known by its acronym Renamo.
Just who the estimated 14,000 men who make up Renamo are remains something of a mystery. Some are disaffected members of the Marxist-backed government that won Mozambique`s independence from Portugal in 1975. Some are Mozambican soldiers of fortune hired in the dying days of the former white Rhodesian government in the 1970s, paid to destabilize the Mozambican countryside.
Judging from the scale of rape, robbery, murder, pillage and arson commited by roving bands of Renamo forces in the last few years in Mozambique, however, many of the Renamo men appear to be nothing more than opportunistic thugs. As a disruptive force, Renamo has been increasingly successful in routing government soldiers and controlling large areas of Mozambique`s 10 provinces.
But Renamo has done little to prove that it has a legitimate claim as a popular rebellion. It has never issued a political program outlining its objectives. It has never set up an administrative program to govern the areas of Mozambique it has conquered. It has never provided social services, food or police protection to citizens in conquered areas.
As a result of Renamo`s terror tactics, in the last two years 4 million Mozambicans have been displaced in their own country. They have fled their homes and farms for government-protected areas. A further half million Mozambicans have escaped to neighboring countries, 80 percent of them to Malawi.
At the current rate of arrivals, international refugee officials estimate that there will be 100,000 more Mozambicans in Malawi by next June.
”So far, there is no end in sight to the influx,” said one international official. ”It won`t taper off until the Mozambican population is exhausted. They are already coming in from regions deeper and deeper inside Mozambique. The situation here is very bleak.
”The international community will have gird itself to take care of Mozambicans in Malawi for a very long time, and very likely take care of Malawians, too.”
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