2019 - The downfall of Sudan’s Omar Al-Bashir

LONDON: During his 30 years in charge of Sudan, President Omar Al-Bashir seemed to thrive on conflict. Whether it was with the southern half of his country, the people of Darfur, the US, or the Islamist ideologues who had helped him gain power, the former paratrooper ruled amid a perpetual state of military and political war.

When the Sudanese people took to the streets against him for what would be the final time, at the end of 2018, it was a battle too far for the then-75-year-old. Al-Bashir was removed from power in April 2019 by the military after months of protests against his rule.

That some of his closest confidants were among those who ousted him showed how his pillars of domestic and international support had collapsed from beneath him.

For the protesters who had braved his security forces to voice their desire for change, the moment was bittersweet; Al-Bashir was gone but the military and senior figures from his regime were now in control.

His legacy was one of bloodshed, extremism, international isolation and economic ruin. At the time of his downfall, he was the only leader of a nation wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide.

Born to a farming family north of Khartoum in 1944, Al-Bashir joined the military after high school and rose through the ranks to become a member of an elite parachute regiment. He was deployed to fight alongside Egyptian forces in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and in the 1980s he was involved in campaigns against southern rebels as part of Sudan’s decades-long civil war.

In 1989, he led the military overthrow of the democratically elected government of Sadiq Al-Mahdi. The coup was orchestrated by Hassan Al-Turabi, an Islamist scholar and leader of the National Islamic Front, an offshoot of the Sudanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Al-Bashir banned political parties and dissolved the parliament, while Al-Turabi acted as the ideological spine of the new regime. They swiftly introduced a hardline interpretation of Islamic law, a move that served to intensify the war raging in the south, where most of the population is Christian or animist (people who believe that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence that can influence human events). The conflict is estimated to have claimed the lives of at least 2 million people.

Al-Bashir extended his allegiance with hardline Islamism by hosting Osama bin Laden, who had been expelled from Saudi Arabia, between 1992 and 1996. It was a move that was to prove disastrous for his country, as the US placed Sudan on its list of “state sponsors of terrorism” and imposed comprehensive sanctions against it.

In 1999, when his alliance with Al-Turabi crumbled, Al-Bashir removed him from his position as speaker of the parliament and threw him in jail. Within a few years, the president was to oversee the darkest episode of his rein.

Rebels in the Darfur region in the west of the country took up arms against the government in 2003. Al-Bashir’s response was swift and brutal. His regime deployed militias, known as the Janjaweed, to unleash a scorched-earth policy of murder, rape and looting against local populations.

The UN estimates that about 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million displaced during the conflict. In 2009, the ICC indicted Al-Bashir, accusing him of having “an essential role” in the atrocities.

In the eyes of many people, it was the breakaway of South Sudan in 2011 that marked the beginning of the end for him. The secession took with it much of Sudan’s oil-producing regions, depriving Khartoum of a key source of revenue and precipitating a steep economic decline.

Al-Bashir was forced to try to rebuild relations with the West and China, and to shift his allegiances in the Middle East away from Iran and back toward the Arab Gulf countries from which he had managed to ostracize himself.

Years of economic problems came to a head in December 2018, when his government tripled the price of bread and public protests began. Al-Bashir desperately attempted to cling to power, appearing at a rally in January 2019 during which he called the demonstrators “traitors” and “rats.” In the months of protests that followed, dozens of people were killed by security forces and thousands thrown in jail.

On April 6, 2019, tens of thousands of protesters set up camp outside the Defense Ministry in Khartoum, where Al-Bashir’s residence was also located. Early on April 11, he was informed that the country’s most senior military and security officials had removed him from power.

This historic moment dominated the front page of Arab News the next day, a mark of both the scale of the story and the political and economic links between Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

“The end of Sudan’s 30-year nightmare” read the headline to the main story, accompanied by a photo of a smiling girl waving the Sudanese flag amid the celebrations in Khartoum.

The front page also featured an opinion piece by the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Faisal J. Abbas, which asked “What next for the Sudanese?” His article highlighted the number of people from the country he had met who had fled Al-Bashir’s regime bound for Europe and beyond, often highly educated doctors and other professionals who would never return.

“The Al-Bashir regime did not mind watching institution after institution fail,” Abbas wrote. “It oversaw Sudan’s becoming one of the poorest in the region, despite its abundant resources.”

After his downfall, Al-Bashir was held at Kober prison in Khartoum, the same facility in which many of his opponents had been detained after he ordered their arrests.

Outside the prison walls, Sudan struggled to move forward, with protests continuing until a deal was struck in August 2019 that led to the establishment of a sovereign council comprising both civilian and military officials.

What came next was a catalog of setbacks for the aspirations of the Sudanese people, which ultimately plunged their country into a catastrophic civil war that rages to this day.

In October 2021, the military staged a coup, dissolved the power-sharing agreement with the civilian leaders and arrested many of them. With power fully back in their hands, however, the generals struggled to make headway against a deepening economic crisis and ongoing protests.

Amid the turmoil, tensions grew between the head of the army, Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as “Hemedti,” who commanded rival paramilitary faction the Rapid Support Forces.

These two disparate characters, who had formed a shaky partnership after Al-Bashir’s downfall, became locked in a power struggle, clashing over how the powerful RSF should merge with the army.

On April 15, 2023, fighting between the two forces broke out in Khartoum and quickly spread to other major towns across the vast country. The nightmare scenario of another devastating conflict in Sudan had come to fruition. It has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and plunged some regions into a famine the UN warns could spread further.

That Al-Bashir allowed the RSF to emerge out of the Janjaweed militias from the Darfur conflict, and become a powerful military counterweight to threats against him from within the army, means the ongoing conflict is yet another part of his dark legacy.

With no end to the fighting in sight and the international community focused on wars elsewhere, the Sudanese who had dared to dream of a brighter future beyond the shadow of Al-Bashir will continue to suffer.

As for the former dictator himself, he was sentenced to two years in prison in December 2019 for corruption. A trial began in 2020 related to his actions during the 1989 coup that brought him to power, but a verdict was never reached.

Now in his 80s, time might be running out for Al-Bashir’s victims in Darfur to see him handed over to the ICC and brought to justice. With his health reportedly deteriorating, he was moved in September 2024 to a hospital 450 kilometers north of Khartoum, a safe distance from the fighting raging across the country.

• Jonathan Lessware is a UK-based journalist at Arab News and former foreign editor of The National in Abu Dhabi.