The Second Sudanese Civil War between the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army had been grinding since 1983 at catastrophic cost to ordinary civilians. In 1989 alone, civilian casualties from famine were estimated at 250,000 - a number that is very difficult to comprehend as anything other than a statistical blur, until you imagine it instead as individual funerals. By February 1989, a group of Sudanese Army officers had presented Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi an ultimatum: either end the war or give the military the resources to end it. Mahdi chose neither. He tried to hold the negotiated middle. The military decided it would take the choice from him.

On 30 June 1989, the Sudanese Armed Forces acted. The democratically elected government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and President Ahmed al-Mirghani was replaced by the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation, or RCCNS. The council claimed, in its founding proclamation, to be saving the country from 'rotten political parties.' Al-Bashir, on that same day, was declared head of state, prime minister, defense minister, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. All opposition parties were banned. Trade unions were banned. 'Nonreligious institutions' were banned. The press came under tight control. Dress and behavior codes were imposed on women. More than 78,000 people were purged from the army, police, and civil administration - a thorough reshaping of the Sudanese state apparatus that would take a generation to even partially undo.

The coup brought a civilian movement to power along with the military: the National Islamic Front, led behind the scenes by Hassan al-Turabi, whose ideological influence would shape the new regime as much as al-Bashir's command. The NIF government received support from Iran and used it to make large-scale arms purchases from China and the former Soviet republics. Those weapons were then used to step up the civil war in the south in an effort to end it by military victory. The effort failed. It lasted another decade and a half before the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which set the conditions for the 2011 secession of South Sudan. By then, the war had killed more than two million people and displaced four million others.

In the early 2000s, rebellion broke out in Darfur, and the al-Bashir government responded by arming and deploying the Janjaweed militia. The campaign that followed - burning of villages, mass rape, deliberate targeting of civilians - produced what the International Criminal Court has since classified as genocide. Al-Bashir was first indicted by the ICC on 4 March 2009 on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity; genocide charges were added in a second warrant on 12 July 2010, making him the first sitting head of state ever indicted for genocide. The Darfur death toll is usually estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000, with millions displaced. For ordinary Sudanese - including those in Khartoum who had no involvement in Darfur - the indictment made their country an international pariah. Sanctions bit. Fuel shortages became routine. The Sudanese diaspora, already large, grew into millions.

Al-Bashir ruled for thirty years. His regime executed, imprisoned, tortured, and silenced uncounted Sudanese - journalists, activists, members of banned parties, protesters. It also presided over the secession of South Sudan in 2011, which stripped Sudan of three-quarters of its oil revenue. It presided over the subsequent economic collapse. It presided over mass protests beginning in December 2018 - protests that, in April 2019, finally brought Sudanese masses back into the streets of Khartoum in numbers large enough to dislodge the man whose coup had ended their democracy thirty years earlier. Al-Bashir was toppled in the 2019 Sudanese coup and eventually imprisoned. The generation that had been adults on 29 June 1989 and woke under dictatorship on 30 June was now, in 2019, mostly elderly. Their children were the ones in the streets.