Declaration comes two weeks after army chief called for diplomat’s removal. UN chief Antonio Guterres said at the time that he was ‘shocked’ by request

Authorities in war-hit Sudan have declared the head of the United Nations mission in the country, Volker Perthes, “persona non grata” two weeks after the army chief accused him of inflaming the conflict 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,” Sudan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday.

Sources at the ministry told Al Jazeera that the mission itself will be allowed to continue its work.

“Some of their staff [are] in the port city of Port Sudan, where most of the mission were evacuated to following the fighting that broke out in mid-April between the Rapid Support Forces [RSF, a paramilitary group] and the Sudanese army,” said Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Omdurman, a city across the Nile from the capital, Khartoum.

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

UN chief Antonio Guterres said late last month that he was “shocked” by the letter from Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan blaming Perthes for exacerbating fighting between the army and the RSF, led by commander Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.

“[Guterres] is proud of the work done by Volker Perthes and reaffirms his full confidence in his special representative,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in a statement at the time. There was no immediate UN reaction to the foreign ministry’s declaration.

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Perthes, a former academic, has headed the Sudan mission since 2021, first during the country’s failed attempts to transition to democracy and then as relations between the military and the RSF deteriorated.

The German diplomat has staunchly defended the UN against accusations of stoking the conflict, saying those responsible are “the two generals at war”.

In his letter to Guterres, al-Burhan accused Perthes of bias and of not respecting “national sovereignty”. He also alleged Perthes presented a misleading picture “of consensus” in his reports to the UN and, “without these signs of encouragement”, Hemedti “would not have launched his military operations”.

The warring sides have blamed each other for provoking the violence.