President al-Bashir of Sudan says he will step down in 2020

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir says he will step down by 2020 and has no plans to run for another term in office. “In 2020, there will be a new president and I will be an ex-president,” Bashir said in an interview with the BBC Arabic Service on Wednesday, adding that his job is “exhausting” and that his current term would be his last.

Bashir has been in power since a 1989 coup, and has been elected president three times since then. He faces International Criminal Court (ICC) charges of genocide and war crimes in the 2003 conflict in the western region of Darfur. 

The Sudanese president, who was last re-elected in April 2015, dismissed the ICC tribunal for him as “politicized” and claimed that the accusations leveled against him by the court have increased his popularity among the Sudanese people and paved the way for his victory in the elections last year.

Bashir also denied New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) allegations of abuses perpetrated by the Sudanese government forces in recent clashes in the country’s Darfur.