I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones in our town center, how they will be especially useful in combating the recent rise in crime.
A few months ago, far right politician Nigel Farage arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches, aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the U.K. on precarious watercraft that traverse the Channel between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces; he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office floats proposals such as using water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel, suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.
A British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to manufacture the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.
Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban – their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling. The men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.
Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones [HC1] in our town center. Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the U.S. police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The Chief Inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to argue that British police were not like the military or the U.S. police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.
I suddenly recollect a fight that broke out in our town center and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or to wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab center based above an arcade of shops which shadow the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others heads down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years, screamed obscenities. Her gaunt face reminded me of the heroin addicts I have seen in Kabul, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf, while cooking opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant; friends and family consider them lost.
Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the briefings I attend as a councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan, which enables farmers using electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once arid dust belt desert, there are fields of thriving poppy, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.
Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – in the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” – as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me – it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly flowering industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, also a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the worlds’ heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tons in 2012, to 9,000 tons in 2017.
And so, in my hometown, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 U.K. police forces [HC2] [MOU3] have either purchased a drone or have access to using one.
Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their Channel crossing overseen by the very same drone used to exacerbate war which drove them away from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.
Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.
Maya Evans is a council person in her hometown, she has responsibilities for natural environment and leisure. She is also a coordinator for the peace group Voices for Creative Non-Violence UK and has visited Kabul 10 times over the last 10 years. www.vcnv.org.uk
