KHARTOUM: Sudan has ordered two senior United Nations officials to leave, a UN staff member said on Thursday, after a recent spike in tensions between Khartoum and the peacekeeping mission in Darfur.

The UN resident coordinator and humanitarian coordinator Ali Zaatari and the UN Development Programme country director Yvonne Helle were asked by the government to leave, the UN staffer said on condition of anonymity.

“That’s all we know at the moment,” the source said, adding they did not know when the officials would have to leave.

It was also unclear why Zaatari and Helle were told to go, the source said, and the UNDP and Sudanese foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Zaatari, a Jordanian national, had been in Sudan for nearly two years, and Helle, who is from the Netherlands, had spent about a year heading the UNDP’s office in the country.

The expulsions come as Sudan’s government is locked in a dispute with the hybrid UN-African union mission in Darfur.

Ties between the two have frayed over Khartoum’s anger at UNAMID’s attempts to investigate a report that government troops raped 200 women and girls in a village in the war-torn western region on Oct 31.

Sudan demanded UNAMID form an “exit strategy” from Darfur, where they have been deployed since 2007 and ordered it to shut a human rights office in Khartoum last month. Zaatari and Helle’s expulsion are the latest in a string of incidents with foreign aid and humanitarian workers in Sudan.

In April, the government told the American chief of the UN Population Fund in Sudan to leave for “interfering” in internal affairs.

The UN and international NGOs provide aid to some of the areas of Sudan worst affected by the conflicts wracking its peripheries.

The government is battling an insurgency in Blue Nile and South Kordofan, as well as a protracted conflict in Darfur.

Ethnic insurgents rebelled against Khartoum in 2003 complaining they were being marginalised, and in the intervening 11 years, the UN says some 300,000 people have been killed and two million displaced.

Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2014