One step forward, two steps back. That is how the Sudanese opposition views Khartoum's overtures. Obviously, the Arab Spring and shifting geopolitics are not forcing the Sudanese government to rethink its operating model. The top mandarins at Sudan's ruling National Congress Party (NCP) are unabashed militant Islamists and are not particularly enthused with Western style liberal democracy. However, they pay abeyance, or rather lip service, to multi-party pluralism. In a speech this week at the opening of parliament, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir declared that his government was committed to a “national dialogue” with all opposition groups of different ideological orientations. The Sudanese people, and the world, have heard such silver-tongued, oratorical gimmicks before — so much so that President Al-Bashir now sounds pathetically monotonous. Al-Bashir's hyperbolic style coupled with his dubious tweaking of the tail of the imperialist tiger falls on deaf ears in Sudan and abroad. To be sure, Al-Bashir has his diehard supporters, henchmen who have a stake in the Sudanese system. His bellicosity gave Western powers, the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and his own Sudanese adversaries lots of ammunition to demonise him. The NCP's predecessors, the National Islamic Front and the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation which Al-Bashir headed until 1993, eschewed genuine democracy and espoused a particularly cruel capitalism sanctioned by religious zealotry, extolling inequality as God-given and designating socialism and especially Communism as an oxymoron. Members of the upper echelons of the Sudanese Armed Forces with leftist sympathies were ruthlessly purged and dissent was equated with treachery and high treason. The outrageous level of inequality now characterising Sudan was deemed preordained by God, and only Godless Communists and those who dared think about emulating them, such as the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), are politically ostracised and black-listed. The alliance of opposition parties and the SPLM-N rejected the president's call. Indeed, the ruling clique became increasingly identified with certain Arabised tribes such as the Jaalin, like Al-Bashir himself, who trace their lineage to the Prophet Mohamed's uncle Abbas and speak Arabic to the exclusion of any other indigenous African language and the Shaigiya. Al-Bashir's government has exacerbated the problem of racism in Sudan, in Arabic “Land of the blacks”, by linking in the collective national psyche Arabism and lighter complexion with piety. A brouhaha erupted this week when a Kuwaiti company sought to recruit fairer-skinned Sudanese — darker-skinned Sudanese need not apply, the company stipulated. The advertisement appeared in a Sudanese pro-government paper, Al-Intibaha reputedly owned by a relative of President Al-Bashir, Al-Tayib Mustafa, who is also the paper's founder and chairman of the board. The paper has since its inception been the mouthpiece of Al-Bashir's NCP. The Sudanese Minister of Human Resources Development and Labour Ishraka Sayed Mahmoud issued a public apology, and she conceded that the whole sordid affair was a racist outrage. However, there is no escaping the fact that the Other Arabised tribes that have benefited from Al-Bashir's authoritarian rule include the Rashaida — the latest arrivals from the Arabian Peninsula and the fairest in complexion of all Sudanese, and the less Arabised and more racially mixed peripheral Arabised tribes such as the Baggara and the Mesiriya tribes of central and western Sudan that have borne the brunt of the fighting with the indigenous non-Arab people of Darfur, south Kordofan and Blue Nile as well as the south Sudanese. Resentment against Al-Bashir's administration is rife. “Today, we announce a decision to free all the political prisoners and renew our commitment to all political powers about dialogue,” Al-Bashir declared, without giving further details. Unsurprisingly this kind of pontification has almost no takers in Khartoum. It was not immediately clear how many prisoners would be released under the announcement. Al-Bashir reiterated his position that Sudan had now “guaranteed the atmosphere for freedoms and the safeguarding of the freedom of expression of individuals and groups”. There is a strong strain of thought in Sudan that Al-Bashir is playing politics and leading the people on. Distrust and exasperation with Al-Bashir and his henchmen in the NCP is common. The dominant Sudanese narrative is that the country's economic crisis is the fault of Al-Bashir and his ruling NCP who let the oil of south Sudan slip from their hands for purely ideological persuasions. Yet, the democracy Al-Bashir espouses is a policy that is designed to be applied in the context of an Islamist political system with dubious democratic credentials that facilitates the management of Western corporate, Chinese and Gulf Arab business interests, a strange strand of Islamist capitalism that works in the interests of the wealthy, the Sudanese ruling clique and political and economic elite. Badgering Al-Bashir is conventional Sudanese sport. The myriad barbs he aims at secularists and leftists are serious enough a threat to frighten off the fainthearted among his detractors. But, Al-Bashir's overtures are widely viewed as a desperate bid to improve relations with neighbouring south Sudan. The government would continue to communicate with “all political and social powers without excluding anyone, including those who are armed, for a national dialogue which will bring a solution to all the issues,” Al-Bashir extrapolated. When he does buck Islamist orthodoxy, it is fleeting and never followed through. The same goes for his supposed championing of democracy. His heart is not in either serious Islamist ideology or Western-style democracy. He is a military man and not an Islamist ideologue. Al-Bashir's announcement was welcomed by the New York-based Human Rights Watch which said it hoped it would lead to an end to arbitrary detentions and torture under Sudan's strict national security laws. And, even the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) declared its readiness for direct talks with Al-Bashir's government and proposed to hold a constitutional conference brokered by the African mediation. Al-Bashir hinted that he would start implementing a six-month-old peace agreement with south Sudan. The bigwigs within the NCP appear to support Al-Bashir unequivocally. Al-Bashir's statement elaborated on an offer made last week by Sudanese Vice president Ali Othman Taha, who conjured up a preamble to win over armed opposition groups loyal to the SPLM-N in south Kordofan and Blue Nile states as well as to the Khartoum-based opposition political parties, whom he invited to join a constitutional dialogue. The alliance of Sudanese opposition parties, the National Consensus Forces (NCF) rejected Al-Bashir's and Taha's overtures. SPLM-N Secretary General Yasser Arman stressed that the African Union (AU) brokered direct negotiations that will be conducted under the supervision of the United Nations Security Council and AU resolutions under the 28 June 2011 framework agreement for national reconciliation in Sudan. Arman suggested that the ruling NCP of Al-Bashir aimed at undermining the AU and UN efforts to restore democracy in Sudan. “The 28 June agreement stated the need for an inclusive constitutional process,” Arman noted. He proposed the convening of a “national constitutional conference for all political forces and civil society groups in Sudan, under the auspices of regional, continental and international organisations” such as IGAD (the East African grouping), the AU and the UN. National Consensus Forces leader Farouk Abu Eissa told Al-Ahram Weekly they wanted “dialogue on their own terms”. He added that the NCP was not serious since three prominent opposition activists were detained after the Sudanese police forcibly dispersed a rally demanding the release of six other Al-Bashir opponents. The six were detained for their connection with a conference in Uganda's capital, Kampala, which spelled out a blueprint for overthrowing Al-Bashir's 24-year regime. Abu Eissa stressed that Al-Bashir's call for dialogue was “the same line” as usual. Bashir Adam Rahma, foreign relations secretary of the Popular Congress Party, led by Sudan's Chief Islamist ideologue Sheikh Hassan Al-Turabi, concurred, noting Al-Bashir's “junta” had a history of calling for dialogue “on their own terms”. The Sudanese political establishment concedes that the country deserves a new constitution to replace the 2005 document based on a peace agreement which ended a 23-year civil war and led to south Sudan's independence in July 2011. The SPLM-N says there is an attempt to divide the ranks of the opposition by ignoring Arman and appealing directly to “opposition parties and the SPLM-N's Malik Agar and Abdel-Aziz Al-Hilu to take part in writing the new constitution”. Agar rejected Vice president Taha's proposed deal insisting that the Sudanese vice president had misled the public instead of facilitating dialogue under the supervision of a UN Security Council resolution. These rhetorical exchanges are of more than academic interest to the Sudanese opposition. By shaping the debate on Sudan's political future, the Sudanese opposition aim at internationalising the Sudanese political crisis. Al-Bashir's government abhors such a policy. However, the Sudanese opposition warns that contemporary Sudan is living with the dire consequences of Al-Bashir's and his ruling NCP's hubris.
