Sudan’s Bashir gives no solution
By Salah Shuaib
March 13, 2009 — Only now the average Sudanese should hermeneutically consider how participating in politics is so valuable and admirable. In reality, politics is your fate that you can’t escape of, and as long as you boost a military dictator’ acts there should be a price to pay, and then you inevitably do not have to cry more over humane catastrophes, or be sad for the destruction of the country image produced by one political field of a dictator.
From what it seems in Sudan’s past situation, a majority of intellectuals and educators have been keeping silence of the central governments approaches that have been hurting people lives.
Instead of playing a major role in directing the nation and the country leaders toward political consciousness and governmental transparency, those elites have preferred not to appear virtues of political criticism, which consistently and expectedly corrects governance failures and makes the people better informed of the danger of letting a dictator or one ideology controls and leads a homeland of diversity.
Such an attitude of intelligentsia, if you want, did not helped our people, through national governance times, find a legacy of criticism of leaders and their plans, a legacy that makes difference in terms of building a country for responsibilities and accountabilities, which are the pillars of political stability everywhere.
Therefore, it is not strange to see such elites, after The International Criminal Court’s warrant arrest against the country president, in a sad silence, which doesn’t factually solve our current crises, nor heal Sudanese’s current psychological and morale pains.
In fact, since the independence period, our intellectual figures have been concerned of how to sustain their personal benefits system rather than to pave the way to a system in which people, with no exceptionality, could benefit.
The meant elites have also resigned of criticizing the seen corrupted aspects in the state institutions and locations, have ignored the mass killings of regional conflicts planed by the state against its own people, and lately have failed in talking of the government reprisal procedures letting the people existence miserable and so endangered by the lack of progress in Sudanese life, dysfunctional policies, partial conflicts, and the like.
Despite all these societal failures, there are still more hopes that the current circumstances facing Sudan can be avoided, and subsequently the Sudanese people could strike a historic reconciliation in which a secular, democratic and federal system is essential and agreed about.
This means that those influenced elites need to recognize that Al-Bashir’s authoritarian regime is surviving its ending, and that thinking about a sort of national government to deal with the people problems must be taken place, and if our intellectuals mind by preoccupied by such a conceivable future of the state, then making hard decisions by Sudanese elite ought to be shown.
It is true that there are much obstacles facing Sudanese ability to form a national government, particularly that there is no a solid national umbrella is now able easily to unify all Sudanese political sections, but in the long run the troubled situation in Sudan is going to lead all fragmented elites efforts toward considering that a solution by a national government is the only option.
Moreover, the fact is that no one party can create the urgent solutions to Sudan’s historically problematic issues, which have adamantly been consuming the elites power, not only this but leaving them in a kind of existential skirmish.
To that, Omar Al-Bashir’s week government is part of the problem and, since it can make no difference in solving these issues, it is the only political body among all Sudanese sections that sees creating a national government as a reduction versus the Islamists gains observed through the past two decades.
But the weakness signs of the government, in spite of types of strength it tries to shows in its daily struggle to maintain power, are encouraging for keeping up efforts to debate of the potentiality of achieving that required political consensus.
Also there may be some honest Islamists inside Sudan’s Islamic movement, as well as some officers in the government who believe that the inner circle of the Al-Bashir regime is entirely not able to avoid this political weakness, and hence they may search, somehow, for a national way that can save the movement and the country simultaneously.
In fact, what one can understand of the latest threats by Sudanese officials toward those who may try to advocate for the warrant arrest of Al-Bashir is that the regime is getting a knockdown that made it forgetting its commitments to the Naivasha Agreement, which gave all Sudanese the right of free expression. Furthermore, these totalitarian threats would show us how the regime fearing from any change in the situation, and how it is not the one that can be trusted to enhance the democratic transition in Sudan.
A national government, very well needed to reconcile with all Sudanese, and that lets us choose our political representatives democratically, is so highly desirable and recommended among all Sudanese, on the ground that it is capable to restore power to the people and deal creatively with the country problems, but necessarily such a hope requires scarifies and struggle. Then let our intellectuals rise up and call for a new national government and call on the average Sudanese exercise the virtue of concerning of politics so that we don’t cry for bad news.
Salah Shuaib is a Sudanese journalist and writer who lives in U.S