Sudan declares UN envoy persona non grata

Sudan's government has declared the UN Envoy Volker Perthes "persona non grata" two weeks after the army chief accused him of fueling the country's internal conflicts and called for his removal.

"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.

Since late last year, Perthes and the UN mission he heads in Sudan have been the target of military protests denouncing foreign intervention.

In a letter to the United Nations last month, Sudan's de facto leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, accused the envoy of escalating the conflict between his army and the militia's Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has repeatedly defended Perthes, who has been angered after criticizing both of Sudan's warring party leaders as the two-month-old conflict eludes efforts to broker a humanitarian ceasefire.

Perthes was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Thursday for a series of diplomatic talks, according to the UN mission's Twitter account.

Last week, the UN's precarious situation in Sudan was highlighted when the Security Council voted to extend the United Nations Integrated Transitional Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) for just six months.

Unitams, created in June 2020 to support Sudan's democratic transition after the fall of Omar al-Bashir a year earlier, had previously been extended 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 collapsing.

Since April, fighting between the army and the RSF has engulfed Khartoum and the West Darfur region, challenging a series of ceasefires.

More than 1,800 people have been killed, and 1.2 million people have been displaced, according to the United Nations and a further 476,800 have fled to neighboring countries, according to estimates from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

ME