UN envoy declared persona non grata in Sudan

The UN envoy to Sudan, German Volker Perthes, has been declared persona non grata by the country's government, the Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday (June 8th). '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 said in a statement. Volker Perthes was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Thursday for a series of diplomatic talks, the UN said earlier on Twitter.

The head of the Sudanese army, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, had called for the dismissal of Volker Perthes, accusing him of being responsible for the war that broke out in mid-April between his forces and those of the paramilitaries of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo. In a letter to the UN, General al-Burhane accused Volker Perthes of having "concealed" in his reports the explosive situation in Khartoum before the outbreak of hostilities. Without these "lies", General "Daglo would not have launched his military operations," he argued.

Following this, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres affirmed "his full confidence" in his envoy. But in early June, the Security Council had extended for only six months the United Nations Integrated Mission for Transition Assistance in Sudan (UNUGATS, Unitams in English), of which Volker Perthes is the head. Created in June 2020 to support Sudan's democratic transition after the fall of Omar al-Bashir the previous year, UNAMIATS had since been renewed annually for one year.