The Secretary-General's Special Representative has warned that the conflict in the Sudan, if not properly addressed, could create the conditions for a widening regional, if not global, confrontation. He also stressed the need to prevent the conflicts from turning into a general antagonism between people with different religions or different ethnic backgrounds. Once the struggles in the Sudan were perceived as a clash between cultures - Arabs against Africans, Sudan versus the West, Islam versus the rest - they became unmanageable and spread to other places.