Chairman of King Abdul Aziz Center for National Dialogue Sheikh Saleh Al-Husain was recently quoted as saying the government is not bound by the recommendations of the national dialogue forums, whether those issued in the past years or those to be issued by future forums.
Dialogue is meant to generate and encourage discussion among different schools of thoughts so that people may not become one copy reflecting the same opinion.
It is true the center has been established under a royal decree and that all national dialogue forums are held under its banner. It is equally true that the state is not obliged to implement the recommendations issued by these forums.
However, I wished such a statement has never come from the chairman of the center, at least to show some respect for the people who participated in previous forums, spending hours discussing and debating even the tiniest detail of their recommendations.
After all the work they have done in the earlier four national dialogue forums, participants must feel disappointed reading such a statement. The chairman of a center supervising the entire process is telling them that all the recommendations they issued would end up in closed drawers and would never see the light again.
It happened that I read the statement two hours before giving a lecture at Abha Literary Club. A lady from the audience asked about the recommendations on women rights which were the theme of one of the previous forums.
All I was able to tell her was refer her to the magazine that published the statement of the chairman of the center. I realized the magazine had in fact spared of us the trouble of trying to give answers to similar questions on women rights.
The honorable chairman may recall how those who participated in the third national dialogue on women rights and obligations had to return to the auditorium after the conference was officially declared closed because we differed on the wording of some recommendations.
We all saw that words and sentences would have an impact on the outcome of the conference, that we are responsible before the Almighty Allah and before the country’s leadership and people for what they say and do.
We mistakenly thought the recommendations that we spent hours drafting would be made into genuine working programs that reflect reality on the ground.
It is true, the state may not be obliged to implement these recommendations, but I wished that harsh expression did not come from the same quarter sponsoring the national dialogue forums so that the conference would retain its moral value and so that all of us would feel the sponsors are indeed part of dialogue mechanism and not just a tool reflecting the official position.
