Gaafar Nimeiry
Gaafar Nimeiry was president of Sudan from May 1969, when as a colonel he led the coup of the free officers that ended the second parliamentary republic, to April 1985, when a general strike and the army removed him while he was in Washington asking Reagan for money. In sixteen years he was, in turn, the Arab socialist who nationalised the banks and allied with Nasser. He was the man who crushed the Communists after their coup of July 1971 and hanged their leader Abdel Khaliq Mahjub. He was the peacemaker who signed the Addis Ababa agreement of March 1972 that ended the first civil war in the south after seventeen years and gave the south autonomy, which brought him the only decade of peace the country has had. He was the developer of the breadbasket strategy that borrowed from the Gulf and the World Bank for the Kenana sugar scheme and the Jonglei canal and produced a debt the country still carries. He was the reconciler who brought the Umma and the Muslim Brotherhood into his government in 1977. Finally he was the Islamist who in September 1983 imposed sharia by decree, the September laws, with the amputations in public, the alcohol poured into the Nile, and the abrogation of the southern autonomy by dividing the south into three, which restarted the civil war under John Garang that ran for twenty-two years and two million dead. The execution in January 1985 of the seventy-six-year-old reformer Mahmoud Mohamed Taha for apostasy was the act the country did not forgive. He was born in Omdurman in 1930, the son of a postman, went through the military college in 1952, was involved in plots against the governments of the 1950s and 1960s, trained at Fort Leavenworth. He commanded the Gebeit garrison before the coup. His Sudanese Socialist Union was the single party from 1971, and his presidency was confirmed by plebiscites of ninety-eight per cent. His survivals of the coup attempts of 1971, 1975 and 1976, the last a Libyan-backed invasion of Khartoum that killed several hundred, were the legend. The famine of 1984-85, the IMF's riots, the airlift of the Ethiopian Jews through Sudan that the Mossad paid him for, and the strike of April 1985 ended him. He spent fourteen years in exile in Cairo, and came home in 1999 under Bashir. He ran for president in 2000 with nine per cent. He died in Omdurman in May 2009, the man who had made the peace and broken it.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: Sudanese
- Roles: president, general, dictator
