Women gather to pray in Port Sudan on April 21.-/AFP/Getty Images
As their fighters marched from door to door in Khartoum, assaulting civilians, firing weapons and looting homes, the commanders of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces made a bizarre announcement on Twitter: They were establishing a “hotline to receive complaints.”
The tweet was immediately mocked by Sudanese civilians, who noted the absurdity of a “complaints hotline” at the RSF, a ruthless militia that has often been linked to massacres and other atrocities. But the tweet was not intended for them. The RSF quickly translated it into English for its intended audience: foreign powers.
Warring factions in Africa and elsewhere in the social-media era are increasingly likely to mobilize international propaganda campaigns, hiring lobbyists and manipulating Facebook and Twitter to spin their versions of events on the global stage. The violent clashes in Sudan are a vivid example of this evolving strategy, as the RSF jostles with the Sudanese military to seek foreign support.
Sudan’s conflict, a power struggle that erupted into deadly combat between the RSF and the Sudanese army last week, has now killed more than 400 people and injured more than 3,500, the World Health Organization said on Friday. The latest attempted ceasefire was swiftly broken by gunfire and explosions in Khartoum and other towns.
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly says Canada’s embassy in Sudan’s capital Khartoum has temporarily suspended in-person operations.
Joly says the Rapid Deployment Team can provide emergency response, co-ordination, consular assistance and logistical support.
The power struggle has never been a purely localized affair. Both sides require international support – not just for weapons and equipment, but also for the financial and economic aid that Sudan will desperately need as soon as the fighting stops. Both sides are looking to mobilize help from their recent allies, or potential supporters in the Middle East, Russia, Europe and the United States. At a minimum, they want to avoid sanctions or other punishments. The spin game is crucial to this.
The RSF and its commander, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, have been masters of this game of international influence. After emerging from the brutal conflict in Darfur, when it was known as the Janjaweed and became notorious for terrorizing and destroying villages, the RSF became wealthy from its role in gold trading and other businesses. It forged links with Russia, which bought its gold, and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which paid for its mercenaries to fight in Yemen.
In 2019, after a coup allowed Gen. Dagalo to become deputy leader of Sudan’s military regime, he signed a US$6-million contract with Canadian lobbying firm Dickens & Madson, in which the firm pledged to polish the regime’s media image and boost its relations with the U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia. Dickens & Madson still listed the Sudanese military regime as one of its clients in January this year, according to its latest filing in the U.S. government’s registry of lobbying activity.
The RSF also reportedly hired a French public-relations firm last year for media training. And in December, 2021, its leaders posed for photographs with International Red Cross officials as they announced that the RSF would receive a training course in international humanitarian law – the rules of armed conflict. It was all part of the RSF’s efforts to paint itself as a progressive and democratic force, regardless of its alleged participation in war crimes in the past.
Sudan is being dragged to the brink of civil war by a power struggle between two men – a career soldier and a former warlord – who rose to power under former autocratic leader Omar al-Bashir.
Reuters
But it is on social media that the propaganda campaigns of the rival warlords have truly flowered. The RSF, while tweeting its battlefield victory claims in Arabic, has used its English-language tweets to portray itself as a pro-democracy peacemaker, to pledge “humanitarian aid” to civilians, and to denounce the Sudanese military as “radical Islamists” – a message designed to appeal to the West and the Gulf states.
The military, for its part, has used its Facebook account to promote its commander, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. On Facebook, often in English, the army routinely claims to support ceasefires and humanitarian aid, while condemning the RSF as a band of rebels and criminals.
Many authoritarian regimes, including Sudan’s, have shut down the internet during coups or protests in the past in an attempt to silence critics and disrupt demonstrations. But significantly, internet services have continued to function in Sudan this time. An early shutdown of one telecommunications provider was quickly reversed. Both sides knew that they needed the internet for their publicity efforts.
The RSF’s social-media campaign has been reinforced by artificial networks of Twitter accounts that appear to be manipulated from outside. One network has been copying and pasting identical content into multiple tweets, often within seconds or minutes of each other, according to an investigation by the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the U.S.-based Atlantic Council think tank.
In reports this week, the researchers revealed a series of suspicious tactics by two networks of pro-RSF Twitter accounts. As many as 900 of the accounts appeared to be hijacked accounts, previously dormant, that are now promoting the RSF and its commander. Others were new accounts, created in late 2022, that heaped praise on Gen. Dagalo and portrayed him as a hero fighting to protect Sudan.
There was evidence of similar tactics on Facebook in 2021, when Facebook’s parent company, Meta, suspended a network of pro-RSF accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government entity.” Some of the network’s page administrators were based in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have had close links to the RSF in the past.
It’s unclear whether these propaganda campaigns are having a direct impact on international support for the two warring sides.
But there is no doubt that a growing number of foreign powers are seeking to influence the conflict. Egypt has deployed warplanes to help the Sudanese army, while Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar sent an airplane to Sudan with military supplies for the RSF, with Russian support, according to several media reports this week. And another report said the United States is considering a plan to impose sanctions on both sides in the Sudan conflict.