The Sudan Handbook

342 thE sudan handbook

shrine, a 60-foot mound, and killed his son Guek, also a prophet. In

southern Sudan, Ngundeng is remembered for his peacemaking abilities

and for his foretelling of the coming of war and foreign aggression.

OmaR Hassan AhmEd al-BashiR (b.1944). Rose to power in the

military coup that ousted Sadiq al-Mahdi’s elected government in June

1989. He has been the head of the party, the NIF/NCP, that has ruled
      Sudan ever since. A Jaali, born in the village of Hosh Bannaga, between
      Shendi and the capital, Khartoum, he joined the army at 16 and studied at
      military academies in Cairo, Khartoum and Malaysia. He was appointed
      commander of the Eighth Brigade in southern Sudan in 1988. Following
      the NIF coup a year later, al-Bashir became the Chairman of the Revolu-
      tionary Command Council, the executive body of the new regime, and
      assumed the title of President in 1993. He was elected for further terms
      in 1996, 2000 and 2010 in flawed elections. In 1999 he consolidated his
      internal position within the NIF/NCP by briefly imprisoning Hassan
      al-Turabi, the ideological architect of the Islamist movement, and
      thereafter sidelining him from power. In March 2009, the International
      Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir for war crimes
      and crimes against humanity, and in 2010, for genocide committed in
      Darfur.

PaGan Amum OkiECh. Soldier and politician. An early recruit from

the Shilluk area to the SPLM/A, he was trained in Cuba and became an

SPLA Commander, later working closely with the National Democratic

Alliance, a coalition of Sudanese opposition parties formed in 1989 to

oppose the ruling Islamist government. He was closely associated with

the New Sudan policy of the SPLM both before and after Garang’s death.

He was elected Secretary-General of the SPLM and, following the 2010

elections, was appointed Minster for Peace and CPA Implementation in

GoSS, with primary responsibility for overseeing the negotiations for the

final separation of the south.

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors

(www.riftvalley.net).