Two years in a rest home for Sudan’s former tyrant

FOR NEARLYICCSPA three decades Omar al-Bashir’s regime butchered and plundered. Since 2010 the former Sudanese president has evaded an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court () for war crimes and genocide in the Darfur region. In Khartoum his Islamist government would flog women for wearing trousers and kill protesters in the streets. After he was ousted in a coup in April, leaving behind an economy in crisis and a country awash with armed groups, many hoped he would spend the rest of his life behind bars.On December 14th a Sudanese court convicted Mr Bashir, aged 75, of money-laundering and corruption after $130m was found in suitcases in his home. But he was sentenced only to two years in a “reform facility” after the court said he was too old to go to prison. One commentator in Sudan said it had, in effect, put him in a nursing home. Residents of Darfur dismissed the verdict as the work of a “political court”, says Mohamed Haggar of the region’s human-rights commission. The Sudanese Professionals Association (), a civil-society coalition that spearheaded the protest movement leading to Mr Bashir’s fall, welcomed the ruling but said it was “certainly not the end of the day”.