Complementing, Not Confronting — Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha The “Complementing, Not Confron

06:12 PM October, 03 2026

Sudanese Online
د. علي عبدالله الخليفة طه-UK
My Library
Short URL


“Complementing, Not Confronting” — Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha
The “Complementing, Not Confronting” Series

From Individual Fairness to Institutional Fairness

A reading of Atif Abdullah’s article “Somoud and Political Memory: When Is Criticism Accountability, and When Does It Become Exclusion؟”

Dr. Ali Abdullahi Elkhalifa Taha

In his latest article, Atif Abdullah poses a question that reaches beyond the Somoud alliance to touch the core of Sudan’s civilian predicament: how do we preserve political memory without turning it into an instrument of exclusion, and how do we build the broadest possible front to stop the war without surrendering accountability؟ It is a legitimate question, indeed an urgent one, at a moment when the military war is running in parallel with “a political and media war among the civilian forces,” as the author rightly observes.

This reading belongs to the series “Complementing, Not Confronting,” which does not set out to refute what others write but to build on it: we affirm what the diagnosis gets right, identify the structural gaps it leaves, and propose the corresponding mechanisms in the Charter of Salvation and State-Building. My central thesis is that Atif Abdullah’s article makes a convincing case for individual fairness, but leaves it suspended on the good judgment of individuals and organizations. After decades of exclusion and counter-exclusion, Sudan needs this fairness to move from a moral stance to an institutional rule.

First: What the Article Gets Right

The article sets out a number of methodological positions that deserve to be affirmed before any discussion. The first is its shift of the central political question from “Where did this organization come from؟” or “Where did this person work؟” to “Where does everyone stand today on the war, on the future of Sudan, and on the civil democratic state؟” This is a necessary shift in a country where personal biographies are so entangled with the history of the state that the criterion of origin alone becomes a criterion of exclusion rather than of accountability. The second is the careful distinction between the official who makes decisions and the employee or professional who performs a task within the state apparatus, a distinction that protects the idea of individual responsibility from dissolving into collective condemnation.

The third is that the author demands that financial transparency apply “to all actors without exception,” and does not exempt the alliance he openly declares he supports. The fourth is his cautious handling of the registrations under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA): he separates the existence of an entry in a public register from accusatory conclusions that the evidence does not support. Finally, he proposes a six-point national minimum: stopping the war and protecting civilians; rejecting the use of arms to reach power; restoring the civil democratic state; equal citizenship without discrimination; justice and accountability for violations; and the independence of national decision-making and the transparency of political work. This is ground on which one can build.

Yet the very strength of this diagnosis also reveals its limits. Everything the author proposes ultimately depends on a question he does not ask: who guarantees that this fairness is applied to everyone by the same standard؟

Second: From Discretionary Fairness to Institutional Fairness

In the case of Ambassador Omar Manis, the article calls for “reading the whole trajectory” rather than isolating a single professional phase. As the author recounts, Manis served in the diplomatic corps during the years of the Ingaz (Salvation) regime, then became Minister of Cabinet Affairs in the first civilian transitional government. The questions the author proposes for evaluation, “Did he take part in political decision-making؟ Was he organizationally involved in the totalitarian project؟ Did he take part in the violations؟”, are sound in substance.

The problem, however, lies not in the questions but in who answers them. As long as evaluation remains hostage to opinion columns and social-media polemics, fairness is necessarily discretionary: the ally’s trajectory is read generously and in full, while just enough is cut from the opponent’s to condemn him. In the absence of a declared standard and a competent body, no one can settle the dispute, and every debate about the past turns into what the author himself warns against, “a permanent inquisition,” or into its opposite: a permanent selective amnesty.

It is worth noting that the author himself sketches, without naming it, a three-tier division of responsibility: those who took part in building tyranny and its violations bear their responsibility; those who were employees or professionals within state institutions are assessed according to their actual role; and those who revised their positions and sided with democratic change should not necessarily be treated like those who clung to totalitarianism. He even makes acceptance of “accountability and transitional justice” a condition for membership of the national front.

Here the Charter proposes its approach of “three-tier transitional justice,” which moves this very three-tier division from the realm of journalistic judgment into the realm of institutions. It is the same idea the author defends, with one essential difference: the tiers are defined by criteria declared in advance and applied through a single set of procedures to everyone, ally and opponent alike. Only in this way does defending Omar Manis, or objecting to him, cease to be a political position whose motives can be questioned and become the outcome of a procedure to which all can appeal.

Third: The Unanswered Question: Where Does Legitimacy Come From؟

At the outset of his article, the author identifies four axes of the questions being raised about Somoud, the third being “sources of legitimacy: the political and popular reference on which Somoud relies in performing its national role.” Yet when the article moves to its treatment, it addresses the Omar Manis question, the dialogue with the Popular Congress Party, and transparency and external relations, and then passes over the legitimacy axis without a direct answer.

In my view this is not a passing omission; it is the heart of the whole matter. The other three questions, who leads, with whom we talk, and who funds, cannot be settled without returning to the question of legitimacy: in whose name does the alliance speak, and to whom is it accountable؟ In the absence of an electoral mandate, an understandable absence in wartime, civilian forces tend to compensate with two sources: the breadth of alliances among elites and organizations, and the international recognition granted by major capitals. Perhaps the only implicit answer the article offers lies in its discussion of the alliance’s diplomatic activity in Washington, Brussels and Addis Ababa as a legitimate part of political work, an answer that confirms this tendency rather than refuting it. Both sources, however important, remain horizontal or external rather than rising from society.

At this point the Charter proposes the concept of “ascending functional legitimacy”: legitimacy in a transitional period is not derived from declarations or international platforms, but earned by performing tangible functions that people feel in their lives, in relief, the protection of civilians, the organization of services and the representation of those affected, and it accumulates from the base upward. By this standard, the question put to Somoud or to anyone else is not “How many forces have joined you؟” or “Who received you in Washington and Brussels؟” but “What function are you performing for Sudanese people today, and how can they hold you to account for it؟” Such a standard would free the debate from the binary of defense and attack, because it places all civilian forces before a single, measurable test.

Fourth: Transparency: From Voluntary Virtue to Institutional Wall

The author affirms that transparency is “a fundamental principle,” and he is right. But when he reaches the practical treatment, he holds that “the best response” from Somoud is “to provide periodic and comprehensive clarifications.” There is a large difference between transparency as a good-faith response to others’ questions and transparency as a binding rule that does not wait for anyone to ask. The first remains hostage to the leadership’s judgment about the timing and limits of disclosure; the second makes disclosure a precondition of public work itself.

In the context of the FARA registration filed by Global Point International on behalf of Dabaiwa Media Network Limited in September 2026, the author notes that those contracts did not refer to “the Civil Democratic Alliance of the Revolutionary Forces,” known by its short name “Somoud.” With respect for his care not to pre-empt condemnation, this observation is a formal defense that does not answer the essential question: who is funding, and in the service of which discourse؟ This is all the more so given that press reports on the registration documents indicate that the engagement was made on behalf of “Somoud” under its short name, even if the alliance’s full name does not appear. In any case, the absence of a name from a contract does not negate a relationship, just as its presence does not prove dependency. What settles the matter is not a reading of contract texts, but the existence of rules that make funding sources public from the outset. I neither adopt nor reject any conclusion about these registrations here; the institutional argument I make does not depend on their details.

At this point the Charter offers the concept of the “institutional wall”: a binding structural separation between political decision-making on the one hand and funding and external influence on the other, a separation not left to the integrity of individuals but guarded by rules of disclosure and review that apply to everyone. This connects to what the Charter calls the “gateway economy”: the pattern in which elites control the gateways through which resources pass, so that control of the gateway becomes a source of power. The danger to be watched, without accusing anyone, is that external funding not governed by declared rules may reproduce the logic of gateways within civilian work itself, so that whoever holds the funding channel holds the decision. The institutional wall is the safeguard against this possibility, for Somoud and for everyone else.

Fifth: Intellectual Revision: From Declaration to Measurable Commitment

The author defends Somoud’s dialogue with the Popular Congress Party and other forces of differing backgrounds by the rule of “firmness in ends and flexibility in means,” and holds that the real question is not “With whom did Somoud sit؟” but “Around what did it sit؟ What did it agree on؟ And what limits did it set؟” This is a sound distinction between political dialogue and ideological alliance.

But the article leaves a prior question hanging: how do we verify that a given force has genuinely revised its positions؟ The description “revisionist Islamist blocs” carries a judgment whose criterion the article does not provide. Is a declared acceptance of the civil state enough؟ Or is a public acknowledgment of responsibility for the period of participation in power required, along with a commitment to submit to transitional-justice procedures and an acceptance of the same transparency standards we demand of others؟ Flexibility of means without conditions of verification may slide, unintentionally, into political whitewashing that grants a certificate of revision to those who have not paid its price.

Here the Charter’s “Transitional Bridge Initiative” offers a framework that turns revision from a declaration into a measurable commitment: joining the transitional path is open, but conditional on specific, declared commitments that are reviewed and whose fulfillment can be verified. This preserves the author’s principle of widening the front while removing the suspicion that dogs such widening: the door is open to all, but its threshold is the same for all.

Sixth: A Front That Makes Room for the Peripheries, Not the Center Alone

The author proposes a six-point national minimum, points that are uncontroversial in themselves. What is striking, however, is that this minimum contains no reference to the center–periphery dimension, which in my assessment explains a large part of the Sudanese state’s failures since independence, and of the wars that culminated in the current one. The front as the article describes it appears to be a gathering of civilian and political forces whose experience and leadership are concentrated in the center, negotiating among themselves over the terms of transition, while the regions that paid the heaviest price of the war remain the subject of discussion rather than a party to it.

Here the Charter proposes the “Fourth Pillar”: regional representation as a structural pillar of any transitional arrangement, not a supplementary item to be added later. Alongside it, it proposes the “Grand National Mobilization” as a framework for mobilizing society itself, not merely an alliance among organizations. The philosophical foundation of all this remains the concept of al-iftiqar, mutual interdependence: Sudan’s components do not come together because a tactical circumstance requires it, but because each of them needs the other in its very existence, in the spirit of philosophies of shared being, the African tradition of Ubuntu, and Elinor Ostrom’s research on the governance of the commons. A front built on mutual interdependence is lasting; a front built on tactical necessity falls apart once the necessity passes.

Hence I propose to Atif Abdullah, and to the civilian forces in general, adding a seventh point to the national minimum: the representation of the regions as an authentic partner in shaping and leading the transition, not a recipient of its outcomes.

Conclusion: Complementing, Not Confronting

Atif Abdullah writes that “disagreement about history should not prevent agreement on the future.” I agree entirely, and I add that agreement on the future endures only if it moves from good intentions to binding rules. The fairness he demands for Omar Manis needs an institutional transitional justice that applies it to everyone; the transparency he calls for needs an institutional wall that does not wait for questions; dialogue with those who have revised their positions needs a declared threshold of commitment; and the broad front needs a legitimacy that rises from society, and peripheries that take part in shaping it.

In this sense, this response does not stand against Atif Abdullah’s article; it stands on its ground and extends its lines to their institutional conclusions. The question he poses at the close of his article, “Which Sudan do we want؟”, deserves to be completed by a further one: by what rules do we ensure that the Sudan we do not want is not reproduced؟

Quotations from Atif Abdullah’s article are the translator’s renderings from the Arabic original (Sudanile, 30 September 2026).

Arabic Forum