Word: nimeiri
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Only hours earlier, Khartoum (pop. 1.4 million) had been a ghost town. Doctors, lawyers, engineers were on strike. The airport and most stores were closed. President Gaafar Nimeiri, the wily strongman who had weathered a succession of coup attempts during an almost 16-year reign, was outside the country. Now, with Nimeiri stranded in Egypt on his way back from a visit to Washington, the people exulted at his overthrow by Suwar al Dahab and the Sudanese military. Some brandished the old yellow, green and blue-striped flag that had been replaced the year Nimeiri came to power; others ripped...
...least, was the intention. Last week, however, as the initial euphoria subsided and a new military council installed by Suwar al Dahab began to assert its power, a tangle of uncertainties remained. They were centered on Suwar al Dahab, the council's head and a once trusted aide whom Nimeiri had appointed Supreme Commander of the armed forces just two weeks before his departure for Washington. Had the new leader organized the bloodless coup in defiance of his former chief or to protect the military leadership against a takeover bid by younger, perhaps more radical officers? Would...
...foreign policy terms, the situation was no less ambiguous. Suwar al Dahab, 51, lost no time in pledging that he would maintain Nimeiri's pro-Western stance. That would allow strategically important Sudan, which is regarded by the U.S. as an important staging area for possible military operations in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, to continue receiving its allotted U.S. aid of about $260 million this year, more than any other African country except Egypt. At the same time, however, Suwar al Dahab promised to try to improve relations with two meddlesome neighbors, Libya and Ethiopia...
According to reports from Khartoum, the bloodless coup was greeted by tens of thousands of Sudanese celebrating in the streets. Two days earlier, the capital had resounded with the largest and most vocal antigovernment demonstrations since Nimeiri came to power in his own military coup almost 16 years ago. At least 20,000 demonstrators, among them doctors, lawyers, bank clerks, uni- versity staffers and engineers, marched through the dusty streets of Khartoum chanting in English, "Down, down with the U.S.A.," and in Arabic, "Down with one-man rule." Police used tear gas to drive the crowds away from the presidential...
...predicted that the coup would not have a major effect on Washington's close relations with Khartoum. Said a State Department official: "The demonstrations provided the release for a kind of pent-up antagonism that took on a momentum of its own." Within hours, Libya, a foe of the Nimeiri regime, became the first country to recognize Sudan's new military leaders. Despite this recognition, Western diplomats in Cairo said they were hopeful that the leaders of the 60,000-man Sudanese army would not radically shift away from Nimeiri's pro-Western outlook...