Gaafar Nimeiry
| Jaafar Muhammad Nimeiri | |
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| 4th President of the Sudan | |
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In office May 25, 1969 – April 6, 1985 |
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| Preceded by | Ismail al-Azhari |
| Succeeded by | Abdel Rahman Swar al-Dahab |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
January 1, 1930 Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt |
| Died | May 30, 2009 (aged 79) Khartoum, Sudan |
| Political party |
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Gaafar Muhammad an-Nimeiry (otherwise spelled in English as Jaafar Nimeiry, Gaafar Nimeiry or Ga'far Muhammad Numayri; Arabic: جعفر محمد نميري; 1 January 1930 – 30 May 2009) was the President of Sudan from 1969 to 1985.
A military officer, he came to power after a military coup in 1969. With his party, the Sudanese Socialist Union, he initially pursued socialist and Pan-Arabist policies. In 1972 he signed the Addis Ababa Agreement, ending the First Sudanese Civil War. He later became an ally of the United States. In the late 1970s he moved towards Islamism, and in 1983 he imposed Sharia law throughout the country, precipitating the Second Sudanese Civil War. He was ousted from power in 1985 and went into exile in Egypt. He returned in 1999 and ran in the Presidential elections in 2000, but did poorly.
He was born in Cairo in Egypt, at a time when Sudan was ruled by Great Britain. He was the son of a postman and the great grandson of a local tribal monarch from the Wad Nimeiry region in Dongola, in the Northern State.
He studied at the prestigious Hantoub School, a British style secondary boarding school for the elite. In an incident in 1948, when protesting against British rule in Sudan by leading students to strike in his school, he was temporarily expelled.
In 1952 Nimeiry graduated from the Sudan Military College, where he was greatly influenced by the ideas of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Free Officers Movement, which gained power in Egypt that same year. Later he joined the Khartoum garrison.
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