The special envoy of the United Nations in Sudan, the German diplomat Volker Pertes, a black sheep for the Sudanese army that had declared him persona non grata and demanded his dismissal, announced his resignation yesterday Wednesday, warning against the risk of generalizing the “civil war of war” in the ravaged country.

“I thank the Secretary General (of the UN Antonio Guterres) for the opportunity he gave me and for the trust with which he surrounded me, but I asked him to relieve me of this duty”, said Mr. Pertes addressing the Security Council, without to explain the reasons that led to his departure.

Asked if he accepted the resignation, Mr Guterres told reporters: “Yes. He had reasons to resign and I must respect his will and accept his resignation.”

In his last briefing to the SA, Mr. Pertes did not favor either of the two sides of the war in Sudan, the Sudanese army and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

“What started as a clash between two military formations could turn into a true civil war,” he warned, stressing that “there is no sign of an abatement in the fighting and neither side appears to be close to a decisive military victory.”

At least 40 people were killed yesterday in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state, in army airstrikes, a medical source and eyewitnesses told AFP.

Mr. Pertes was the UN Special Envoy to Sudan for two and a half years and concurrently Head of Mission in the country (MINUATS in French, UNITAMS in English), established in June 2020 to support the transition to democracy after the fall of Omar el Bashir in 2019.

In June, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, army chief and de facto head of state after a coup in late 2021, demanded he be removed from the post, blaming him for the war that broke out on April 15 between the armed forces and the paramilitaries under General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

Khartoum had declared that it would demand the withdrawal of the UN political mission if Mr. Pertes remained in office and that it considered him undesirable.

The SA extended in early June for just six months the mission’s mandate in Sudan.

Speaking during yesterday’s meeting, the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, expressed Washington’s “regret” and once again called the threats by Sudan’s de facto government “unacceptable”.

“No country can be allowed to threaten the ability of this Council to continue to fulfill its responsibilities for peace and security,” he stressed.

In his report, Mr. Pertes calls for “the belligerents to be made to understand that they cannot act with complete impunity and that they will be called to account for the crimes committed”.

There is “no doubt” that war crimes are being committed by the warring parties, he said, denouncing in particular the air bombardments carried out “indiscriminately” by the army.

It found at the same time that most cases of “sexual violence”, “looting” and “murders” of civilians are committed “in zones controlled by the DTY”, while “both parties arbitrarily arrest, imprison and even torture civilians”, and are denounced as “extrajudicial executions”.

At least 5,000 civilians have been killed and another 12,000 injured since the war broke out, which will mark five months tomorrow, according to figures given by Mr Pertes, who stressed that they were greatly underestimated.

Various international mediation efforts have so far at least failed to bring about a lasting ceasefire.

The fighting has turned nearly 5 million people into internally displaced persons and refugees, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries.