Daily Archives: 23 July, 2019

1971: Four for Sudan’s Siesta Coup

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On this date in 1971, four leftist officers who had briefly overthrown the government of Sudan were shot — just one day after their coup collapsed.

This was but a brief and early interruption in what proved to be the 16-year (1969-1985) reign of Col. Gaafar Nimeiry, who himself had taken power at gunpoint two years earlier.

Although Nimeiry initially had the support of Sudan’s then-robust Communist Party, the colonel soon clamped down on the staunchest and most pro-Moscow Communists, eventually inviting the attempted coup.

The “Siesta Coup” was mounted on the scorching afternoon of July 19 while city traffic was greatly thinned by the absence of everyone who could arrange to duck into a shady refuge instead, and it worked at first: Communist officers bloodlessly seized control of the government and of Nimeiry’s own person. But very few Sudanese people — and almost no governments in the region — had enthusiasm for the usurpers; Muammar Qaddafi even had Libyan fighter jets intercept and force down a Khartoum-bound British Airways flight carrying two coup-friendly politicians from London, so that he could arrest them on the tarmac in Benghazi.*

On July 22 anti-Communist soldiers deposed the coup government and restored Nimeiry. Within hours, four principal actors in the Siesta Coup were being dispatched to their eternal rest; the others were Maj. Hashem al?Atta, commander in chief of the armed forces for the coup government; Col. Abdel Moneim Ahmed; Lt. Col. Osman Hussein; and Capt. Muaweya Abdel Hal.


The doomed Hashem al Atta passes his waning hours enduring a harangue from Khalid Hassan Abbas.

* Those two men, Farouk Osman Hamadallah and Babakr al-Nur Osman, were returned to Khartoum as soon as Nimeiry was back in the saddle, and were also executed within days.

On this day..