The Sudanese government has declared United Nations envoy Volker Perthes “persona non grata”, two weeks after the army chief accused him of stoking the country’s civil conflict and sought to have him removed from his post.
Since late last year, Perthes and the UN mission he heads in war-torn Sudan have been targeted by military and Islamist-backed protests denouncing perceived foreign interference.
In a letter to the UN last month, Sudan’s de facto leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan blamed the envoy for exacerbating fighting between his army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
UN chief Antonio Guterres has repeatedly defended Perthes, who earned ire after criticising both leaders of Sudan’s warring parties as the two-month conflict evades efforts to broker a humanitarian ceasefire.
“The Government of the Republic of Sudan has notified the Secretary-General of the United Nations that it has declared Mr. Volker Perthes … persona non grata as of today,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday.
Perthes was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Thursday for a series of diplomatic talks, according to the UN mission’s Twitter feed.
Last week, the precarity of the UN’s status in Sudan was highlighted when the Security Council voted to extend the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) for only six months.
Created in June 2020 to support Sudan’s democratic transition after the fall of Islamist-military ruler Omar al-Bashir a year earlier, UNITAMS’s mandate had previously been renewed annually for a year.
Sudan’s stuttering path to civilian rule was disrupted in 2021 when Burhan and Daglo together seized power in a coup before falling out.
Since April, fighting between the army and the RSF has gripped Khartoum and the western region of Darfur, defying a series of truces.
Upwards of 1 800 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, and the UN says 1.2 million have been displaced, with more than 425 000 fleeing abroad.