SUDAN: A STARVING NATION DESPITE AID ATTEMPTS

The photographs in the newspaper and on our television screens and national news magazines are almost too much to bear: starving children whose bodies are ravaged by hunger, and adults who look like those horrible images of concentration-camp survivors at the end of World War II.

Mostly, these images are coming from Africa, which not only continues to be the cyclical victim of drought, famine and civil war, but also continues to demonstrate every way imaginable to botch worldwide relief efforts.

For 15 years, civil war has been raging in Sudan, disrupting attempts to grow crops that could feed an estimated 2.6 million people in areas where the fighting is heaviest.

Each month, the United Nations spends $30 million to air-drop food in the area, but the people continue to starve. Why? Mainly because most of the food is diverted by various military factions to be eaten by fighting troops, not by starving Sudanese.

For most of the world, such widespread chaos and dying is unthinkable. And for those who want to end the suffering of innocent victims, there is little but despair over the failure to get food into hungry stomachs.

It is a terrible lesson that our world is capable of such atrocities.