Going before he's pushed

Jeffrety Gettleman has an article in The New York Times about the departure of yet another Arab leader, this time on his schedule:

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, who has been in power more than twenty years and faces international charges of genocide, will not run for office again after his current term ends, a Sudanese government spokesman said Monday.
Mr. Bashir seized power in 1989 in a military coup and has ruled with an iron fist ever since, crushing or trying to crush numerous rebellions across Sudan. But now, said Rabie A. Atti, a Sudanese government spokesman, Mr. Bashir “has no will to be a president again. He said the chance should be given to the next generation,” Mr. Rabie said. “He will work to establish a real democratic system in our country.”
Mr. Rabie said the decision and its timing had “nothing, nothing at all” to do with the popular revolts against longstanding autocrats now erupting across the Arab world, which have inspired relatively small but spirited protests in Sudan as well. “In Egypt, there was a gap between the rulers and the people, but not in our country,” he said. In Sudan, he said, the rulers “live with the people.”
Many Sudanese would disagree with that claim. Mouysar Hassan, a 22-year-old student who had joined recent demonstrations, dismissed the announcement as “just an attempt to anesthetize the street”.
Mr. Bashir was elected president last year in an election that outside observers said was tainted by fraud, intimidation, and bribery, and his term expires in 2015. He has been a lightning rod of a leader, lionized by some within his country for delivering a modicum of development to certain parts of northern Sudan but vilified by Western leaders and human rights groups, and many of his own people, for devising repressive and often brutal policies, including the counter-insurgency campaign in Darfur. The International Criminal Court has charged Mr. Bashir with crimes against humanity and genocide in connection with the bloodshed in Darfur, a sprawling desert region on Sudan’s western flank.
A political science professor at the University of Khartoum, al-Tayeb Zein al-Abideen, said that, despite the denials from the Sudanese government, this announcement is “an immediate response to what is happening in the region”.
Mr. al-Tayeb has his doubts whether Mr. Bashir is even serious about stepping down, saying that if Mr. Bashir really intended to give up power, he or someone else close to him would make a major address, not task a government spokesman to deliver such news. “In the Arab world, we have become accustomed to rulers staying in power until they die,” he said.
Many analysts consider Mr. Bashir a wily pragmatist. Last month, when it was clear that southern Sudan was going to vote overwhelmingly to separate from the northern part of the country in a historic independence referendum, Mr. Bashir got on board, vowing to help the south, even though he had waged an intense war against southern rebels for years – and would stand to lose billions of dollars in oil profits if the south split off.
It is not clear who would succeed him. Some seasoned Sudanese opposition leaders have voiced fears of trying to force him out abruptly, saying that the country could fragment into a violent, Somalia-like situation if his government suddenly fell.
Still, thousands of young Sudanese, inspired by the events in other parts of the Arab world, have been calling for exactly that. In the past month, protests have broken out across northern Sudan, many organized through Facebook, much like the movements in Egypt and Tunisia that drove out their leaders. Scores of Sudanese students have been beaten by the police or arrested and one student was killed, and now some opposition parties seem to want to push it further.
“We have the rich experience of two popular uprisings,” said Faruq abu-Issa, a spokesman for a coalition of opposition parties, referring to popular uprisings in Sudan in 1964 and 1985, which brought down the governments of their day. He said that his colleagues were “preparing ourselves, like Tunisia and Egypt.”