Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president who today became the first head of state to be charged with war crimes by the international criminal court in The Hague, was a 45-year-old colonel when he took power in a military coup in 1989.
The then army officer, who had trained in Cairo and served with Egyptian forces during the 1973 war against Israel, overthrew the government of Sadeq al-Mahdi, and later suspended political parties. In 1993, he dissolved the military junta that had brought him to power, appointing himself civilian president.
The main challenge of Bashir's first decade and a half in power was trying to end the brutal and bloody civil war between Sudan's north and south, which began in 1983 and is estimated to have killed almost 2 million people.
However, by the time Bashir's regime signed a deal to end that conflict, in 2005, another brutal battle was raging in Darfur, the vast, mainly desert province in Sudan's west.
Beginning in 2003 when Darfur's population rebelled against perceived government favouritism towards Arabs over the region's native African population, the bloodshed escalated when Bashir's government allegedly unleashed, with official sanction, the Janjaweed militia to quell the uprising.
Accusations of mass killings by the militia, as well as wholesale rape and the forced removal of millions of tribal people from their traditional lands, form the basis for the ICC charges against Bashir. He vehemently denies any responsibility.
The president, now 64, is a personally secretive and sometimes contradictory figure who, while having imposed some elements of Islamic law on the country, has also made some moves to liberalise its economy, particularly where oil is concerned.
However, he is known to be desperate to avoid the division of Sudan, a belief that has in part fuelled his hardline policy towards Darfur. Bashir has strongly resisted any international pressure on the issue, stalling over a timetable for the arrival of a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force to the region.
He is extremely unlikely to be forced to go to The Hague to face trial in the near future. While Bashir's regime is not strong, opposition forces are fragmented, and there is no apparent immediate threat to his rule.
In an analysis of the war crimes investigation in yesterday's Observer, Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, the authors of a book about modern Sudan, described Bashir as being unwedded to any particular ideological stance.
"Some commentators use the word 'evil' to describe Bashir," they wrote.
"This is a simplification. Bashir is a pragmatist who responds to incentives … But he is also a proud and stubborn man, who responds to affronts to his dignity with rage. When humiliated, he lashes out."
Bashir's willingness to be flexible was demonstrated in December last year when he intervened to pardon Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher imprisoned for insulting Islam by naming a school teddy bear Muhammad.
Observers noted that the president had avoided an international outcry by allowing Gibbons to go home - but only after a delay of a few days, as a presumed sop to his hardline Islamic constituency.