Muhammad Jaʿfar Numeiri

1930 -

Military leader; president of Sudan.

Muhammad Jaʿfar Numeiri (Nimeiri, Numairi, Numayri) was born at Wad Nubawʾi, a suburb of Omdurman, Sudan. After education at the local Qurʾanic school, El Hijra Elementary School, the Medani Government School, and the Hantoub Secondary School, he entered military college in 1949 and graduated as a second lieutenant in 1952. Thereafter, Numeiri served in the Western Command and the armored corps stationed at Shendi. He became a great admirer of Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arab revolution, a view reinforced by training in Egypt and by his arrest and suspension from duty (1957 - 1959) after supporting the abortive coup by Abd al-Rahman Kabediya. He later served in Juba, in southern Sudan, and in Khartoum, where he proved troublesome and consequently was sent on military training courses to Cyprus, Libya, West Germany, and Egypt. Numeiri returned to play an active role in the overthrow of the government of his superior, General Ibrahim Abbud, in October 1964, which resulted in his arrest and transfer to the American Command School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Upon his return to Sudan he was implicated in another abortive coup but once again survived to be given a more sedentary position as commanding officer of the military school in Khartoum.

Stationed in the capital, Numeiri was able to plot and successfully carry out a military coup on 25 May 1969 against the government of Ismaʿil al-Azhari, whom he replaced with his Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), an imitation of Nasser's revolutionary command council of 1952. The first challenge to his regime came from the Ansar (Mahdists) in March 1970. The Sudan army assaulted the historic sanctuary of the Mahdi and his Ansar at Aba Island, 150 miles south of Khartoum, decisively defeating the rebels and killing the spiritual leader of the Ansar, the Imam al-Hadi.

The second and more serious challenge came from the Communist Party (SCP) of Sudan. The Communists had originally been represented in the RCC and, emboldened by their success, sought to seize control of the government by a coup d'état on 19 July 1971. After a bloody struggle lasting three days, Numeiri prevailed. The Communist leaders were promptly executed, the party prorogued, and its organization in the Sudan dismantled. Having defeated his enemies on both the right and the left, he called for a plebiscite that elected him president of the Sudan, after which he dissolved the RCC and established the Sudanese Socialist Union (SSU) as the single ruling party.

Having consolidated his control in northern Sudan, Numeiri turned to the seventeen-year civil war with the southern Sudanese. He and the respected southerner, Abel Alier, brought the war to a conclusion after negotiations with the Anya-Nya southern insurgents at Addis Ababa on 27 February 1972. The Addis Ababa Accords granted a limited autonomy to southern Sudan, but the means of its implementation and preservation were never clear. At the time it was an extraordinary achievement whereby one of the most destructive civil wars in Africa seemed to have been peacefully resolved. Numeiri basked in an outpouring of international acclaim for his statesmanship. With Sudan at peace, he enjoyed ten years of complete authority marred, however, by his growing isolation from the Sudanese, whose frustration erupted in several abortive attempts to overthrow him. These halcyon years were accompanied by an economic boom that resulted from Numeiri's encouragement of foreign investment in Sudanese agriculture to transform Sudan into the "breadbasket" of the Middle East. Large tracts of land, much of it marginal, were seized by the state, which displaced Sudanese farmers and herdsmen for Sudanese and Middle Eastern entrepreneurs anxious to reap quick profits from large mechanized agricultural schemes. Numeiri also sought, with little success, to establish a rapprochement and national unity with Sadiq al-Mahdi and his Ansar, whom he had savagely defeated in 1970.

These initiatives were accompanied by a change in his lifestyle and ideology. Abandoning the habits of a tough soldier, Numeiri in the late 1970s became engrossed in rigorous interpretation of Islam at a time when there were endless political disagreements with the southern Sudanese and a decline in the nation's economic prosperity. He came increasingly under the influence of the Sudanese Islamists led by Hasan al-Turabi who were determined to transform Sudan into an Islamist state from the secular one of Jaʿfar Numeiri. He mis-perceived that the increasingly influential National Islamic Front (NIF) were more dependable political allies than the southern Sudanese. In October 1981, after a series of strikes and demonstrations precipitated by the declining economy, he dismissed the National Assembly and the leadership of the SSU. Next, he unilaterally repudiated the Addis Ababa Agreement by dissolving the southern Regional Assembly and imposing his own Council for the Unity of the Southern Sudan.

The rapid deterioration of his popularity was hastened by the introduction in September 1983 of shariʿa (Islamic law), which would apply to all Sudanese, Muslim and non-Muslim, in its restrictions on individual behavior and its draconian penalties for petty offenses. This led to criticism from both Muslims and non-Muslims, dismay among the northern Sudanese, and the revival of the civil war in southern Sudan in May 1983, led by Colonel John Garang de Mabior and his Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).

Numeiri declared a state of emergency. His adoption of the Islamist religious policies and stringent economic decrees produced serious riots throughout the cities of northern Sudan. He left Khartoum for the United States to seek additional financial assistance. While in Washington, D.C., on 6 April 1985, he was deposed in a bloodless coup d'état led by his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Suwar al-Dhahab, a Muslim Brother. Numeiri traveled from Washington to Cairo, where he was granted asylum and kept in house confinement for eleven years, until President Bashir allowed him to return to Sudan in May 1999. He received a spontaneous reception at the airport but has been told to live in quiet retirement.

Bibliography

Alier, Abel. Southern Sudan: Too Many Agreements Dishonoured. Exeter, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 1990.

Khalid, Mansour. Nimeiri and the Revolution of Dis-May. London: Kegan Paul, 1985.

Malwal, Bona. People and Power in Sudan: The Struggle for National Stability. London: Ithaca Press, 1981.

— ROBERT O. COLLINS