Church workers say Darfur's real fight is over resources

Published: 2005-07-12

NYALA, Sudan (CNS) -- To an outsider, there does not appear to be much in Nyala to fight over: a lot of desert, a few camels and, for a couple months of the year when it rains, some green grass that provides a welcome respite from the otherwise omnipresent sand. Yet church workers providing aid to some of the more than 2 million people displaced by fighting in western Sudan's Darfur region say that behind the violence lies a bitter struggle over diminishing supplies of water and arable land. "This is a war that's first and foremost about resources," said Bjorg Mide, director of the ACT/Caritas Darfur Emergency Response, a program that brings together the world's Protestant and Catholic aid agencies in an effort to help people who have been chased from their homes by a scorched-earth campaign that many characterize as genocide. U.N. officials say more than 180,000 people have died in the last two years because of armed conflict in the Texas-sized region of Darfur. Other experts put the death toll as high as 400,000.

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