The hardest thing about the Sudanese dialogue is not announcing the call for it, nor opening its hall. It is persuading Sudanese, amid the deep divisions the war has aggravated, that sitting around a single table can lead to a result different from what earlier dialogues ended in.
This is why the step announced two days ago by the preparatory committee for the Sudanese-Sudanese dialogue- the move from the preparatory phase to broad consultations with the parties, blocs, and political forces- appears more important than a mere procedural transition. The most sensitive phase has begun now.
Over the past four weeks, since the committee and its initiative were announced, the task has been neither easy nor static. The founding phase always involves a great deal of organizational work that goes unseen but is necessary for launching any serious political process. Even so, the committee has made progress in its contacts with community forces, meeting hundreds of tribal and religious leaders; there have been contacts with external parties, including a meeting with the international Quintet and with envoys and ambassadors from European states; and there were preliminary contacts with political parties.
But the most complex phase begins now, because dialogue with the political forces is bound up with divergent calculations and positions, amid the deep division Sudan is living through.
These consultations draw their importance from several considerations. The first is widening the base of participation, so that contacts include parties, alliances, blocs, and more of the community's components- including the forces that reject the dialogue. A dialogue that seeks to address a broad national crisis cannot begin by excluding those who disagree with it.
The second is building trust. Direct meetings allow the committee to listen to the parties and answer their questions, which helps reduce misunderstandings and doubts about the dialogue. They also make it possible to identify the points of agreement and disagreement, and to learn which issues could form common ground and which need wider negotiation.
The third is preparing the parties for participation. A dialogue does not succeed merely by sending invitations; it needs a political readiness to sit with others, even when the distances between them are wide.
Through these consultations a realistic agenda can also take shape, based on the issues raised by the political and social forces themselves. That matters for preventing the dialogue from turning into a mere formality, and for ensuring that it is a political and social process capable of producing implementable understandings.
It is precisely here that many questions can be expected, such as: how can it be ensured that the dialogue does not become merely a process for conferring legitimacy on a fait accompli?
That is a legitimate question, particularly in a country exhausted by political conflicts and wars, where initiatives and agreements have multiplied without always being able to move the country to a different reality.
The answer the committee offers is that its task is not to grant legitimacy to any party, but to prepare a platform through which Sudanese can discuss their country's future. Final political legitimacy, in this conception, is not granted by the preparatory committee; it results from a Sudanese consensus and agreed political procedures.
Another question: who sets the dialogue's agenda?
The preparatory committee's position is that it neither possesses nor seeks to impose a ready-made agenda, but seeks to listen to the different parties and gather their proposals. The consultations can reveal the issues on which a measure of consensus exists, as well as the most contested files, and so allow the participants to build an agenda that eases their work.
In the end, adopting the final agenda should be the task of the participating parties themselves, through the dialogue's preparatory meetings.
Preconditions for participation are another test. Some of these conditions may concern guarantees necessary for building trust and providing a suitable environment for participation; these can be discussed and worked through. But turning every political demand into a condition for entering the dialogue may in practice empty the idea of dialogue of its content, since the disputed issues are, in the first place, precisely what the participants are supposed to discuss.
Most important, the dialogue should not be reduced to the political forces alone. The war and the Sudanese crisis did not afflict the political elites only; they reached the whole of society. Any dialogue that seeks to lay a foundation for a different future therefore needs to be broader than a closed dialogue among politicians, and more connected to the social components that bear the cost of the conflict and await its end.
Success in the consultation phase, then, does not mean reaching a prior political agreement, but creating the minimum of trust, acceptance, and inclusiveness that makes dialogue possible. Nor does success mean the absence of disagreement; it means the capacity to manage disagreement within an open political process.
Sudan does not need a dialogue that is new in name only. It needs a dialogue different in nature, broad in its participation, clear in its rules, and capable of turning difference from a cause for continuing the conflict into a gateway to a political consensus that sets the country on the road to peace, stability, and democracy.
