[news] One Hellhole under God: Why America is (suddenly) interested in Darfur, Sudan

[Resist!ca]

Why the Republican Party suddenly cares about Sudan--or at least pretends to. 
Of all the unlikely places for America to be getting involved in another war, 
western Sudan has particularly little going for it. Unless you count a few 
million potential candidates for the Christian missionary business, there's 
little to interest outside entrepreneurs. What the country has in extraordinary 
abundance is problems. And thanks to a surprising chain of events, it looks as 
though some of these problems now belong to the United States, too. The root 
cause of the Darfur conflict is actually ecological, with prolonged droughts 
and rapid desertification driving poor pastoral "Arabs" to take over the lands 
of even poorer settled "black" farmers. With extensive damage to the ecology 
throughout the region, what we see as ethnic conflict is really resource 
conflict at root, with religion even further down the list of factors.

URL: http://resist.ca/story/2004/7/28/113814/091