These are times of unrest for North Africa, where extremism has found its way in the post-Arab Spring era through the expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist and terrorist organisations. Tunisia, Libya and Egypt have been at the centre of media attention, but Sudan has been off the radar of international and regional media until recently.
“These are the times of ISIL and Al Qaeda, when regimes and peoples tremble before the threat of further fragmentation in the Arab world, as Africa fears the violence of Boko Haram and that of young jihadists,” wrote Helmi Shearawi in Al Ittihad, the Arabic-language sister newspaper of The National.
Shearawi said that Sudan had followed “a somewhat different pattern” to the rest of North Africa.
He said there had been no major breakthroughs in Sudan because the “peripheral wars” in that country constituted no threat to the elite in the capital, Khartoum.
He concluded that “a comprehensive peaceful solution is far from being achieved without the activation of democratic procedures and principles of human rights”
In the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, Abdelaziz Hussain Al Sawi wrote: “With the exception of such destinies that are triggered under the surface, the worst among disastrous destinies of [Arab] countries is by far that of Syria, which suffered an implosion resulting from cumulative oppressions while the tyrannical regime stubbornly stood by its positions, ready to defend them at all costs.”
Turning to North Africa, he continued: “The Sudanese, including intellectuals and academics, see the source of their crisis in the vicious circle between civil and military governments.
“[But] there is no such thing as a vicious circle here. There is a horizontal line with slight twists.”
The writer said that totalitarian regimes often flourished through the weakness of civil society activism, when political parties lacked democracy and were based on ideology and sectarianism.
In this situation, the writer said, the middle class no sooner left the grip of the state than it fell under the grip of a political party.
“These are the elements behind society’s inability to produce democratic impetus,” wrote Al Sawi.
He remarked that the absence of such a force in Sudan had opened the door to a totalitarian regime. Meanwhile, the opposition forces had been kept busy with armed conflicts at the peripheries after the secession of South Sudan, he noted.
“The common denominator among all oppositions is the lack of ideology, planning and vision that would combine to change the current regime while avoiding schisms and impending civil war to establish a strong and sustainable democracy,” he wrote.
In the meantime, the regime makes all the necessary concessions to maintain a margin of power throughout the transitional period, amid foreign interventions that serve as an Arab, African and International guarantees, the writer concluded.
Translated by Carla Mirza
cmirza@thenational.ae