|
Jaafar Muhammad an-Nimeiry (otherwise spelled in English as Jaafar Nimeiry, Jaafar Nimeiry or Ja'far Muhammad Numayri; April 26, 1928 – May 30, 2009) was a Sudanese politician who served as the president of Sudan from 1969 to 1985.
A military officer, he came to power after a military coup in 1969. Establishing a one-party state, with his Sudanese Socialist Union as the sole legal political entity in the country, Nimeiry pursued socialist and Pan-Arabist policies and close collaboration with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. In 1971 Nimeiry survived a pro-Soviet coup attempt, after which he forged an alliance with Mao Zedong of China (who provided him with significant military and economic assistance), and, eventually, with the United States as well.
In 1972 he signed the Addis Ababa Agreement, ending the First Sudanese Civil War. In his last years in power he also adopted aspects of Islamism, and in 1983 he imposed Sharia law throughout the country, precipitating the Second Sudanese Civil War. He was ousted from power in 1985 and went into exile in Egypt. He returned in 1999 and ran in the presidential elections in 2000, but did poorly.
Biography edit
Jaafar Nimeiry traced his lineage to the city of Dongola, one of the most important places where the Nubian tribes live and spread heavily in Northern Sudan. He was educated at the Omdurman primary and elementary school, then in Wad Madani secondary school, and finally in Hantub school that had a British colonial character.
After graduating from the Sudan Military College in 1952, Nimeiri acted as commander of the Khartoum garrison and led campaigns against rebels in southern Sudan. He joined in a number of attempts to overthrow the Sudanese government. In 1966 he graduated from the U.S. Army Command College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Three years later he overthrew the civilian regime of Ismāʿīl al-Azharī and was promoted to major general. He became prime minister and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). He put down a right-wing revolt led by Sayyid Ṣādiq al-Mahdī in March 1970 but was briefly overthrown by a communist coup in July 1971. In September 1971 he was elected president in a plebiscite with 98.6 percent of the vote.
Upon his election as president, Nimeiri dissolved the RCC and established in 1972 the Sudanese Socialist Union, a political party of which he also became president. He was credited with bringing about negotiations that led to a settlement of a long-running conflict with the southern Sudan region, to which he granted autonomy in 1972.
When Nimeiri assumed power, he first pursued a socialist economic policy but soon shifted course in favour of capitalist agriculture, designed to make Sudan a major food producer. In March 1981 he inaugurated the Kinānah sugar project, one of the largest sugar refineries in the world. His efforts were hampered, however, by a succession of economic crises brought on in part by overly ambitious development plans, and his reign was punctuated by many attempted coups.
In 1977, a National Reconciliation took place between Sadiq al Mahdi, the leader of the opposition who was based abroad, and Nimeiry. A limited measure of pluralism was allowed and Sadiq al Mahdi and members of the Democratic Unionist Party (Sudan) joined the legislature under the umbrella of the Sudan Socialist Union. Hassan al-Turabi, an Islamist leader who had been imprisoned and then exiled after the May Revolution, was invited back and became Justice Minister and Attorney General in 1979.
Nimeiri became the first Muslim leader to back the efforts of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to establish peace with Israel. As president of the Organization of African Unity (OAU; now the African Union) in 1978, Nimeiri reasserted his position that Africa should keep free from entanglements of “alignment” with external powers.
In 1981, Nimeiry, pressured by his Islamic opponents, and still President of Sudan, began a dramatic shift toward Islamist political governance and allied himself with the Muslim Brotherhood. His attempts to promulgate measures of Islamic law in Sudan alienated many in the predominantly Christian southern region, as did his abrogation of the 1972 agreement that had granted southern Sudan autonomy. These factors helped to fuel the resumption of war with southern Sudan (now South Sudan) in 1983.
In April 1985, while he was in the United States, Nimeiri was overthrown by his defense minister in a bloodless coup. He then lived in exile in Egypt from 1985 to 1999, in a villa situated in Heliopolis, Cairo. He returned to Sudan in May 1999 to a rapturous welcome that surprised many of his detractors. The next year, he ran in the presidential election against incumbent president Omar al-Bashir, but did poorly, obtaining only 9.6% of the votes in elections that were boycotted by the Sudanese opposition and alleged to be rigged. In 2005, Nimeiry's party, the Alliance of the Peoples' Working Forces signed a merger agreement with the ruling National Congress Party. The National Congress negotiated an end to the Second Sudanese civil war that was signed in a Comprehensive Peace Agreement on 9 January 2005.
Nimeiry died of natural causes in his home in Omdurman on 30 May 2009. Tens of thousands turned up to his official funeral including members of Sudan's political forces that had opposed his rule.