Anger over the past 30 years against a brutal regime has imploded, Thursday’s coup that ousted President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan recalls the people’s victory in the Philippines in the 1980s and the Arab Spring of 2011.

The trend is now manifest in the Afro-Arab world generally. Much as the world had condemned Bashir’s repression, the comity of nations must give it to the people that it is they who have got rid of him. Small wonder that the protesters in Khartoum have swiftly binned the army’s claim that it has ousted the oppressive President.

Rejected too is the military’s contrived claim of takeover. The popular movement has for now come to its logical conclusion. The most recent protests began last December as economic conditions worsened, culminating in an almost weeklong sit-in outside the army headquarters.

But resistance to Bashir’s regime dates back to the very day he seized power in a military coup in 1989. The seeds of resistance had, therefore, germinated at the threshold. Since then, successive waves of dissent have all been brutally quashed by Bashir and his coterie of Islamists and mercenaries.

Though he has met his comeuppance at the hands of the citizenry, the African country, fractious as it is, is very likely to be on a powder-keg for sometime yet. As the groundswell of rebellion had built up over three decades, dissenters were jailed without trial and tortured.

So insufferable indeed was the persecution that entire families had fled the country. Under Bashir’s presidency, the humanitarian crisis had intensified in parallel to the persecution of Christians.

The hardline application of sharia targeted the Coptic segment, whose members all but disappeared and their churches were shattered. Thursday’s coup was thus the chilling culmination of disaffection, almost total, exemplified by the persecution of dissenters and religious minorities.

To that can be added the ethnic and tribal conflicts that Bashir had instigated to consolidate his spurious hold over the divided country. Indeed, in the context of the genocide in Darfur, Bashir had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide.

It is a humanitarian tragedy that Sudan had, over the years, become synonymous with ethnic cleansing. Such tragedies shape history and deeply regrettable must be the fact that the persecution of the Rohingyas in Myanmar ~ reckoned by the UN as the worst ethnic cleansing since World War II ~ has overshadowed the hideous record of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.

Just as the UN has been ineffectual in Myanmar and various other storm-centres, so too has it failed in Sudan. And quite the most remarkable facet of Bashir’s comeuppance is the spontaneous countermobilisation of the people, horribly late though it has been.

It is the Sudanese people, their patience sorely tried by a crippled economy, who have ousted the ruler. On Thursday, they were armed with nothing but 30 years of anger. And that can be suitably potent.