South Sudan and the June Islamic Revolution in Sudan, 1989–2011

Abstract

I never had any personal relationship with Brigadier General Omer Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir until 2004, just a few months before the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between General Bashir’s government in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), representing the political cause of the people of South Sudan, was concluded in Kenya after very long negotiations. Unlike most serving senior Sudanese army officers, I had not personally known General Bashir while he was a serving military officer. I was not in the country on 30 June 1989, when the general seized power in a military coup in Khartoum. I had been invited to make a statement on the situation in Sudan before a special session of the German parliament in Bonn, before the Germans moved their parliament back to Berlin. By that time, the civil war between South Sudan and the central government in Khartoum, reactivated in the South by the SPLA in May 1983, was raging. I had established a newspaper in July 1986 in Khartoum, The Sudan Times, one year after the Nimeiri regime was overthrown in the popular uprising of April 1985.