Omar al-Bashir

Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir (born 1 January 1944) is a Sudanese former military officer and politician who served as head of state of Sudan under various titles from 1989 until 2019, when he was deposed in a coup d'état. He was subsequently imprisoned, tried and convicted on multiple corruption charges.

Al-Bashir came to power in 1989 when, as a brigadier general in the Sudanese Army, he led a group of officers supported by National Islamic Front (NIF) in a military coup that ousted the democratically elected government of prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi after it began negotiations with rebels in the south; he subsequently replaced President Ahmed al-Mirghani as head of state. He was elected three times as president in elections that have been under scrutiny for electoral fraud. In 1998, al-Bashir founded the National Congress Party (NCP), which remained the dominant political party in the country until 2019. In March 2009, al-Bashir became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), for allegedly directing a campaign of mass killing, rape, and pillage against civilians in Darfur. On 11 February 2020, the Government of Sudan announced that it had agreed to hand over al-Bashir to the ICC for trial.

In October 2005, al-Bashir's government negotiated an end to the Second Sudanese Civil War, leading to a referendum in the south, resulting in the separation of the south as the country of South Sudan. In the Darfur region, he oversaw the War in Darfur that resulted in death tolls of around 10,000 according to the Sudanese Government, but most sources suggest between 200,000 and 400,000. During his presidency, there were several violent struggles between the Janjaweed militia and rebel groups such as the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in the form of guerrilla warfare in the Darfur region.