Jaafar Nimeiri

Sudanese president who confirmed his land as ‘Africa’s most dysfunctional country’
Lawrence Joffe
The Guardian, Friday 5 June 2009
Article history
As president of Sudan, Africa’s largest nation in area, Jaafar Nimeiri, who has died aged 79, mutated from an enthusiastic, pan-Arabist and socialist into a pragmatic supporter of free enterprise, private ownership and foreign investment. Having seized power in the May revolution of 1969, he fended off successive insurrections but, having suppressed two powerful Sufi orders, the Ansar and Khatmiyya, Nimeiri then recast himself as an imam.
In September 1983 he applied sharia law throughout his country, resuscitating outmoded punishments such as amputating the hands of thieves and fornicators, and the ceremonial emptying of liquor worth $5m into the Nile. Such trappings of piety failed to impress the Ansar, or shore up his ebbing fortunes. He was deposed by popular revolt in 1985.
Nimeiri’s early career closely resembled that of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. In 1969 both young colonels rose from humble backgrounds to become national leaders overnight. They emulated the secularist Free Officers movement that overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952.
“Everything must change,” declared Nimeiri when he dethroned the prime minister, Ismail al-Azhari. His vow struck a chord after years of sectarian and tribal strife, coups, colonial neglect and constitutional ambiguity. He was vigorous and idealistic, wrote a regional commentator, Alex de Waal, persuading “ordinary Sudanese that they could build their nation anew”.
In December 1969 he committed Sudan to join a grandiose, pan-Arab federation with Libya, Egypt and Syria. He later clashed with Gaddafi, saying: “He has a split personality – both parts evil.” Instead, Nimeiri befriended the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and was the only Arab leader to stand by Sadat after Egypt’s Camp David accords with Israel in 1978. Sudan also expelled its Soviet military advisers and became the second largest African recipient of US aid after Egypt.
To his lasting credit, Nimeiri did end a gruelling civil war that had raged since 1955 between Sudan’s mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian and animist south. He signed the Addis Ababa peace pact of 1972 with the Anya-Nya rebels and granted autonomy to Sudan’s three southern provinces.
For 11 years a tentative peace held, but the economy teetered. From 1978 to 1984, the national debt was rescheduled five times and hyperinflation reduced the Sudanese pound to a fifth of its earlier value. These years, wrote de Waal, “cemented Sudan’s reputation as Africa’s most dysfunctional country”.
Nimeiri rekindled the north-south conflict in 1983 with the imposition of sharia law and the peremptory dissolution of the southern government. By no means all the carnage can be laid at his door, but by 2005 at least 1.5 million people had been killed and another 4 million rendered homeless.
Nimeiri was the football-loving son of a postman, born in the Wad Nubawi district of Omdurman, near Khartoum. He was educated at Koranic and state schools and graduated from Khartoum military college in 1952. He was arrested repeatedly for subversion during the 1950s and 1960s. After training in Cyprus, Libya, West Germany and Egypt, he took a military course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (1964-66).
As ringleader of the 1969 coup, he dissolved parliament, banned all political parties and headed a revolutionary command council. He then named himself commander-in-chief and defence minister, and crushed an incipient Ansar rebellion, killing thousands near Aba island on the Nile. The dead included Al-Hadi al-Mahdi, grandson of the religious ruler who defeated Britain’s General Charles Gordon at Khartoum in 1885.
In July 1971 Libyan troops helped Nimeiri recover power after communist officers – led by Babikr Awadallah, briefly Sudan’s prime minister – whom he had earlier purged, took control for three days.
In September 1971 he stood as sole candidate in presidential elections, repeating this exercise in 1977 and 1983. At least six coup attempts followed his 1972 treaty with the south. After crushing mercenaries backed by the erratic Gaddafi in 1975, Nimeiri summarily executed 98 rebels and set up detention centres, or “ghost houses”, where torture was reportedly the norm.
In 1977, fearing unrest, he invited other parties to participate in national reconciliation. He had created the Sudanese Socialist Union in 1972 as his personal platform, but by 1978 independents nearly outnumbered SSU candidates in assembly elections. Nimeiri also released from prison Hassan al-Turabi, the charismatic Muslim Brotherhood leader, and made him attorney general in 1979. Increasingly, Turabi became the power behind the throne.
When, in 1981, Chevron discovered oil deposits near Bentiu in southern Sudan, southerners feared that Khartoum would seize control. Turabi encouraged Nimeiri’s extension of sharia law two years later, and this lit the tinderbox. Now Nimeiri faced a formidable foe in John Garang, the American-educated head of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
US funds and arms still poured in because Sudan was seen as a bulwark against Egypt and Libya. Nimeiri won further financial sweeteners for secretly helping Falasha Jews escape war-ravaged Ethiopia via Khartoum to Brussels, Nairobi and ultimately Israel. And together with the Saudi tycoon Adnan Khashoggi and the Israeli politician Ariel Sharon, he entertained notions of using Sudan as an arms cache for future battles against Iran and Libya.
Meanwhile, famine grew in Darfur, prices soared, refugees poured in, power cuts were rife, infrastructure projects mired, and students, doctors and rail workers went on strike. Feeling beleaguered, Nimeiri ordered the trial and execution of the popular Islamic reformer Mahmoud Taha in January 1985. Finally on 6 April, amid public turmoil and economic strife, he learned that his defence minister, General Suwar al-Dhahab, had seized power. The president went into exile in Egypt.
On 22 May 1999 Nimeiri accepted an amnesty and returned to Sudan to unexpected acclaim. He set up the Alliance of the People’s Working Forces and contested presidential elections in December 2000, taking second place behind Omar al-Bashir, with 9.6% of the vote. After that his support declined, and in 2005 his party merged with the ruling National Congress. Yet to judge by the crowds at his state funeral, some Sudanese were prepared to overlook his shortcomings.
Nimeiri is survived by his wife.
• Jaafar Muhammad Nimeiri, politician, born 1 January 1930; died 30 May 2009