A president's progress

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen," Winston Churchill said. It is a dictum Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir seems to have followed to the core as he witnessed his country carved up to create the world's newest nation earlier this month.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with General Salva Kiir in Juba in early July, Al Bashir was witness to history being crafted as the South Sudan president told a jubilant crowd: "When you cry, we cry; when you bleed, we bleed." A few days later, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admitted the Republic of South Sudan as the world's 193rd country in the UN General Assembly. "Welcome, South Sudan. Welcome to the community of nations," he said.

With a long and remarkable history often intertwined with Egypt, Sudan has witnessed a series of disruptive conflicts — ethnic and economic — since gaining independence from Britain in 1956. That was much before Colonel Al Bashir seized power in a bloodless coup in 1989, when the country was in the middle of a 21-year civil war between the north and the south. Al Bashir brought an end to the strife, signing a Comprehensive Peace Agreement that granted autonomy to what was then the southern region of the country.

From 1989 to the summer of 2011 it has been a long and eventful journey for Al Bashir and Sudan, replete with bitter fighting and enduring acrimony between the north and south punctuated by sporadic peaceful interludes. Apart from the conflict in Darfur — which brought him the first indictment of a sitting head of state by the International Criminal Court (ICC) — Al Bashir has survived bombings ordered by president Bill Clinton on suspicion that Khartoum had ongoing ties with Al Qaida, and overseen the development of the country's fast-growing oil industry. The oil wealth, along with Sudan's close relations with China and a peace deal to end the civil war in 2005, have fuelled strong economic growth over the past decade.

However, rather than the growing economic prosperity, it is the conflict in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan that have put Al Bashir in the global spotlight. Faced with increasing scrutiny and global criticism in the aftermath of the crisis, Al Bashir has handled it with a mix of indifference, defiance and plainspeak. Soon after the ICC indicted him on several charges over his role in the conflict, including crimes against humanity, attacks on civilians and pillaging town and villages, Al Bashir told Time in an interview that the problems in Darfur, a vast western province inhabited by both Arabs and Africans, began when rebels attacked government offices and security forces. "Any government in the world, when facing an armed rebellion, has a constitutional, legal and moral obligation to resist those militants," he told the news magazine.

Al Bashir's handling of the crises has attracted wide-ranging criticism from the international community, civil society and the occasional high-profile activist. On the eve of the results of the ICC's Darfur investigation being presented in June 2009, Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie wrote in a plea to the members of United Nations Security Council: "The evidence the [ICC] prosecutor has presented is clear and compelling. Millions of people have been displaced; hundreds of thousands have been killed; and at the centre of it all stands Sudanese president Omar Hassan Al Bashir … [whose] response to the indictments was an insult to the international community and the hundreds of thousands who have died in Darfur."

The international pressure notwithstanding, Al Bashir has often reacted to the ICC indictments by stressing the double standards of global geopolitics. "The US Air Force in Afghanistan mistakenly bombed a wedding and killed 147 civilians. But you cannot say that the US president should be tried for this because he is the Commander in Chief of US forces," Al Bashir told Time in the interview. "Not even the head of the [US] Chiefs of Staff would be put to trial," he said, adding that the ICC "is a tool to terrorise countries that the West thinks are disobedient".

Born in 1944 into a farmer's family, Al Bashir joined the army as a youngster and rose through the ranks, fighting the Egyptian army in the 1973 war against Israel. Analysts who have watched him transform from a soldier to a statesman say he is still the career soldier at the core, not particularly fond of eloquent interviews or managing his public image — and therefore highly underestimated. "He's a man for whom dignity and pride are very important [and he's] prone to angry outbursts, especially when he feels his pride has been wounded," Sudan analyst Alex de Waal told the BBC News website.

"Political work in Sudan, as I see it, is not a comfortable task," Al Bashir said in a 2005 interview. "It is tiring, exhausting and with great responsibilities. I used to tell some presidents whose periods had ended that the best thing is to be a ‘former president' — someone who is respected, appreciated and without any responsibilities."

Such observations haven't, however, worked for him: Despite the international arrest warrant, Al Bashir has been re-elected president.

While Al Bashir's avowed goal was to keep the unity of Sudan intact, his biggest fear was that the south would secede in a referendum agreed upon in the 2005 peace deal and executed early this year. That fear came true when the results of the referendum were announced in January — an overwhelming 97 per cent of the voters preferred an independent South Sudan.

In 2005, when Al Bashir signed the peace deal with rebel leader John Garang and his Sudan People's Liberation Movement, he took pains to stress that the deal had not been a defeat. "We did not sign it after we had been broken. We signed it while we were at the peak of our victories," he said at the time. Earlier this year, many analysts had predicted that the ICC indictments and the referendum results could provoke Al Bashir into adopting more aggressive strategies and that violence in Sudan would escalate. After all, most of Sudan's oil is in South Sudan, with estimated reserves of some 6.7 billion barrels. At present estimates, it produces about 500,000 barrels a day that are transported via a pipeline to Port Sudan in the north, with oil revenues estimated at about $9 billion (Dh33 billion).

However, after the referendum, a restrained Al Bashir announced that he would respect the verdict and gave his consent to the creation of the world's 193rd nation.

For a former paratrooper who came to power as part of a military coup and whose career as a soldier and president has been defined by war, agreeing to the formation of South Sudan has been a brave but uneasy choice. Perhaps history will remember Al Bashir as the leader who was courageous enough to sit down and listen to the voice of reason when most needed.