Omar al-Bashir
Omar al-Bashir ruled Sudan for thirty years, lost a third of its territory, was indicted for genocide, and was removed by a sit-in outside his own army headquarters. He was a paratroop brigadier who took power in a coup in 1989, backed by an Islamist movement whose leader Hassan al-Turabi supplied the ideology and, for a decade, most of the direction. The regime imposed sharia nationally, dissolved parties and unions, and detained opponents in houses that acquired a name of their own. It also sheltered Osama bin Laden from 1991 to 1996 and was placed on the American list of state sponsors of terrorism. The civil war with the south, running since 1983, was the central fact of his rule. It ended in a peace agreement in 2005 that promised the south a referendum, and in 2011 the south voted almost unanimously to leave. Sudan lost three quarters of its oil production with it, and the economy never recovered. In Darfur from 2003 the government answered a rebellion by arming Arab militias against the settled population. Several hundred thousand people died and millions were displaced, and in 2009 the International Criminal Court issued the first arrest warrant it had ever issued for a sitting head of state, adding genocide charges the following year. He continued to travel, and several states declined to arrest him. In December 2018 protests began over the price of bread. By April 2019 they had become a permanent sit-in outside the army headquarters in Khartoum, and the army removed him rather than fire on it. He was convicted of corruption and held in the prison he had used for his own opponents.
- Lived: 1944 CE – ?
- Nationality: Sudanese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
