Monday, February 21, 2022

Canada's Communist Party's warn Emergencies Act will ‘suspend civil and democratic rights’

The warning comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invokes the act to end anti-vaxxer protests paralysing the country


People gather outside a police station in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Sunday, February 13, 2022, demanding authorities remove truck drivers and other protesters who have taken over the area around Parliament Hill to demonstrate against Covid-19 restrictions


CANADA’s communists have slammed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act to end the anti-vaxxer protests paralysing the country, warning that such a move will “suspend the civil and democratic rights of everyone in Canada.”

Mr Trudeau invoked the Act, which gives the federal government broad powers to restore order, on Monday, but ruled out using the military.

His government threatened to tow away vehicles to keep essential services running, freeze truckers’ personal and corporate bank accounts, and suspend the insurance on their rigs.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who is also the finance minister, said the government will also broaden its anti-money-laundering regulations to target crowdfunding sites that are being used to support the blockades.

Mr Trudeau did not indicate when the new crackdowns would begin, but he said the emergency measures “will be time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address.”

For more than two weeks, hundreds and sometimes thousands of protesters in trucks and other vehicles have clogged the streets of the capital Ottawa and besieged Parliament Hill, railing against vaccine mandates for truckers and other Covid-19 precautions while condemning Mr Trudeau’s Liberal government.

Members of the self-styled Freedom Convoy have also blockaded various US-Canadian border crossings, though the busiest and most important — the Ambassador Bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit — was reopened on Sunday after police arrested dozens of demonstrators.

A statement from the Communist Party of Canada warned that the Emergency Act would effectively suspend the Charter of Rights, and called into question the Ottawa police’s handling of the protests.

“Police inaction in Ottawa stands in stark contrast to harsh repression against Indigenous peoples whenever Indigenous sovereignty clashes with the capitalist theft of land and resources,” the party said.

“All this demonstrates that new policing, surveillance and repression powers will ultimately be used against the labour and people’s movements as opposed to the far right.

“Big business may think the Emergencies Act is a good idea — eliminating both border delays and the right to strike. But working people — the labour, democratic, and civil rights movements — must speak up to oppose this sledgehammer to democracy.”


COMMUNIST PARTY OF CANADA (MARXIST-LENNINIST)

In the News

February 19, 2022

Current Developments Related to Declaration of Public Order Emergency

Parliamentary Debate

On February 16, a motion was tabled in the House of Commons to confirm the February 14 declaration of a public order emergency by the Prime Minister under the Emergencies Act. [More]

Financial Measures Applied Under the Emergencies Act

While debate was taking place in the House of Commons, February 17, on whether or not it will approve the Liberal’s invoking of the Emergencies Act and the related regulatory powers, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland announced to the media rather than the House that she had ordered financial institutions to comply with its regulations. [More]

Canadian Civil Liberties Association Launches Lawsuit

On February 17, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) announced it will pursue litigation to challenge the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act. [More]

Standoff in Ottawa Continues Despite Police Measures to Clear Out Protestors

Police in Ottawa made over 100 arrests on Friday, February 18 and at least 47 more by 2:00 pm on Saturday, news agencies report. In addition, a total of 38 vehicles have been towed and others are reported to have left voluntarily. [More]

For Your Information

Regulations for Implementation of Emergencies Act

The regulations put in place following the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act were published in the Canada Gazette on February 15, 2022. [More]


End 'deafening silence' over state persecution of Julian Assange in Britain's media, UN expert demands



JULIAN ASSANGE would be free within days if the mass media ended its “deafening silence” over persecution of the Wikileaks founder, a UN expert claimed today.

UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer accused major news outlets of failing to play their role as the “fourth estate” to inform the public about the implications of the case against Mr Assange on press freedom and the rule of law.

The UN official said he had previously believed the press would “jump on” evidence pointing to “political persecution and gross judicial arbitrariness” in the case. But instead he has faced a “wall of silence.”

“This man has become so untouchable because of the narrative that has been created, but there is no evidence of that,” Mr Melzer told a media briefing organised by the Foreign Press Association on Friday on his new book The Trial of Julian Assange.

“[The press] are not able to play their role as the fourth estate and inform the public about due process violations that are being played here behind the curtains. That really what I found is extremely concerning.”

Mr Melzer’s book details the findings of his two-year investigation into Mr Assange’s case. In it he accuses Britain, the US, Sweden and Ecuador of “grave and systematic due process violations,” judicial bias and manipulating evidence.

He also accuses the US and British authorities of colluding to secure a conviction against the Wikileaks founder, who is facing extradition to the US due to his publication of confidential documents exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“If the US succeeds in prosecuting this man and sending him to a supermax prison for the rest of his life this will have an enormous chilling effect on free press,” he warned.

Mr Melzer initially declined to get involved in the case when approached in 2018, writing that his perception of Mr Assange had been distorted by prejudice due the “demonisation” of Mr Assange by the authorities and the press.

Eventually changing his mind, Mr Melzer visited Mr Assange at high-security Belmarsh prison in 2019, where he has been held for more than three year in solitary confinement.

Following an examination he concluded that Mr Assange’s treatment was tantamount to “psychological torture.”

Despite the grave findings, Mr Melzer said the British authorities have refused to co-operate with him to clear up the allegations or initiate an investigation required by international law, which he described as “profoundly shocking.”

Similarly, he said he was “very alarmed” by the “muted” response of the press to his findings.

Giving an example, Mr Melzer said he had given televised interviews to the BBC and Sky News in 2019 on his report, warning against the extradition of Mr Assange, that were subsequently removed “without trace” from the web.

When he called the BBC to ask why the interview had been taken down, he said he was told that the topic was not newsworthy.

“This attitude to me reflects an unwillingness to actually look at the elephant in the room,” he said.

“The silence is deafening. If the main media organisations joined forces I believe this case would be over within days.

“The media is not here to entertain us — it is here to empower us, it is the fourth estate for a reason and it is important that they keep fulfilling that societal role.”

Mr Melzer noted that the BBC had kept the report on its website and in a radio broadcast, but that this would not have achieved the same global impact as the televised interview.

The UN official, who has been in the role since 2016, added that there was “no legal basis” for keeping Mr Assange locked up and that evidence for charges over computer hacking had been “fabricated.”

Mr Assange revealed some of the “most grave crimes” committed by governments, Mr Melzer added, including the murder of civilians and torture, however no-one has been prosecuted even with video evidence.

“That really is shocking, where you can see that war crimes are not being prosecuted but those who expose them are being prosecuted.

“That displays a systemic problem of enormous proportions.

“We cannot have legitimate dissent and exposure of serious government’s crimes resulting in impunity for officials and life sentences for witnesses and whistleblowers and journalists. This is extremely dangerous.”

A BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC covered this story on a number of its platforms. An interview with Nils Melzer was broadcast live on our international news channel, which is available in 465 million homes around the world, and his comments were featured prominently on our news website, which is available both within and outside of the UK.”
DISASTER CAPITALI$M REFUGEE'S
Planned Greek refugee camp is in ‘high-risk’ fire zone next to landfill


Experts say the location of Lesbos’s new refugee camp is remote, prone to wildfires and would be ‘nearly impossible’ to evacuate



Sebastian Skov Andersen & Gabriel Geiger
15 February 2022

The aftermath of the fire at the Moria refugee camp in September 2020 |
Nik Oiko/ZUMA Press Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

The unpaved road leading to the site of the future refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos is long and winding, snaking through dry forest terrain for roughly ten kilometres. Far from any towns, and adjacent to a domestic landfill site, this remote area, which is at risk of wildfires, projects a far from subtle message: out of sight, out of mind.

The planned refugee camp is one of five new EU-funded, high-security, multi-purpose reception and identification centres (MPRICs), promised as part of the European Union and Greek government’s new pact on migration to replace the current camps on the country’s islands. The agreement was announced in September 2020, just days after the notorious Moria refugee camp on Lesbos burned down.

According to the pact, the new refugee camps must ensure, among other things, the right to “health” and “security” for the asylum seekers living in them. In practice, this has translated into prison-like conditions, with barbed-wire fences and concrete walls surrounding the camps, and 24/7 surveillance.

In November 2020, Greek media, citing government sources, reported that the new camp on Lesbos would be built at Vastria, adjacent to the island’s largest landfill dump, at the far edge of the municipality of Mytilini and inside a large, protected forest. A month later, the European Commission published a ‘memorandum of understanding’ regarding a new “pilot” camp on Lesbos. The objective of the pilot, the commission wrote, was to “channel the necessary support to the Greek authorities for completing and operating, by September 2021, an up-to-standard fully functioning MPRIC on Lesvos with a capacity of 5,000 people”.

However, construction of the Lesbos camp was postponed without explanation – it is now expected to open in September this year – while the new camps on the islands of Chios, Kos, Leros and Samos opened last year.

“A new era is beginning,” claimed Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi at the opening ceremony for one camp. “We are extricating our islands from the migration problem and its consequences.”

Last week, island residents protested at Vastria, after the construction company charged with building the camp began moving machines to the site overnight. Police reportedly arrested four people for defacing construction equipment and some machinery was even lit on fire. The same day, the governor of the North Aegean region, Costas Moutzouris, announced that he would be appealing to the Council of Europe against the construction of the camp.

Wildfire danger

Humanitarian organisations and forestry and fire experts expressed alarm to openDemocracy at the remote location of the planned Lesbos camp – especially in the wake of Greece’s record heatwave last summer, which forced mass evacuations on the mainland and some islands.

Lesbos residents received emergency warnings via SMS prohibiting them from entering forests because of the wildfire risk, and firefighter trucks were stationed at intervals along mountain roads. With Moria’s destruction by arson still fresh in people’s minds, the potential threat of wildfires to the new camp seemed overwhelming, according to local media.

Natural hazards expert Michalis Diakakis from the University of Athens said the proposed location is a “high-risk zone” for wildfires, due to its low altitude, minimal summer rainfall and dense, highly flammable pine forests.

The planned Vastria refugee camp is several kilometres from the nearest town | Sebastian Skov Andersen


Diakakis, who is also an adviser to the Greek fire service, said that most wildfires on Lesbos happen in the eastern part of the island, where Vastria is located, because of its dense, tall forests – the proposed new camp is on the edge of the largest forest in the Aegean. To safely operate a camp in such a location would require significant measures to both prevent and extinguish wildfires, including keeping firefighting machinery such as fire trucks and bulldozers on site, clearing vegetation both inside and around the camp, and developing clear evacuation plans and routes.

“The majority of fatalities happen in areas where you have a lot of people trying to get away from a place, [making] it difficult to evacuate,” Diakakis said. “Because of the heavy smoke and toxic gases, people tend to inhale huge amounts and then collapse, and then the fire catches them. Most deaths […] like that are in small areas with a few houses, or in small towns near forests.”

The European Commission’s migration department said they were aware of the issue, adding that the Greek authorities were responsible for ensuring the camp’s safety and that the commission had faith in their ability to do so.

The commission said by email: “[The] local forest authority and the fire brigade will be consulted and provide approval at every stage of planning and implementation of the new centre. To combat the risks associated with a fire starting from within the centre, the installation of a fire protection system is foreseen. […] Evacuation plans and safe evacuation routes are a prerequisite for building facilities for accommodation of any kind.”

The Greek ministry of migration and asylum did not respond to multiple emails from openDemocracy asking if any measures were being taken to ensure the safety of camp residents in the event of a wildfire. Last month, according to Greek media, the country’s parliament voted for an amendment to permit approvals for refugee camp structures on the Greek islands and also in Evros on the mainland. Instead of consulting regional services, the ministry wants to oversee and approve studies carried out by its own directorate of technical services.
Humanitarian organisations and wildfire experts have expressed alarm over the location of the Vastria camp 
| Sebastian Skov Andersen

While there is a wide – but currently unpaved – road connecting the camp to a small motorway to the south, only a small dirt road leads in the other direction. “If you don’t have a warning system in place, then it’s optimal to have two ways out. If you do [have a system], you can usually stick with one. So, if you have a fire coming from the south, you migrate to the north; if you have a fire coming from the north, you migrate to the south,” explained Diakakis. The Greek government has not given any indication as to whether they would improve road access to and from the camp.

Fires have also posed a challenge for the Mavrovouni camp on Lesbos, which was erected as a temporary replacement for Moria. There have been multiple reports of fires there; openDemocracy was able to confirm at least one, in December, by speaking to numerous camp residents who witnessed it. No casualties or major injuries have been reported.
Evacuation ‘nearly impossible’

The NGO Lesvos Solidarity criticised the plans for the new camp, noting that Greek environmental regulations from 2016 set a capacity limit of 750 residents per refugee camp. Larger camps need a comprehensive environmental impact assessment in order to gain a permit. In April 2020, before the burning of Moria and the subsequent migration pact, a ministerial decree increased the limit from 750 to 5,000 – significantly increasing the challenge of evacuation from areas such as Vastria.

Among those who have expressed concern about the new camp’s location is forestry expert Babis Petsikos, formerly of the Aegean University’s environmental department on Lesbos. He has also served as an adviser to Greece’s ministry of Environment and the United Nations’ climate change panel (UNFCCC). His former job dealt with the management and preservation of Lesbos’s forests.

Petsikos said it was “extremely possible” that a fire would break ou​​t in the area. “The lowland pine forest around the camp is the most flammable forest type in the Mediterranean,” he said. “If a fire breaks out, it will be very difficult – if not impossible – to extinguish before everything burns down. And experience shows that fires often break out in and around refugee camps.”

Petsikos added: “This is extremely dangerous for everyone living around there, and we do not know about the safety of people’s lives as we have not seen any fire protection plan.”

The lowland pine forest around the camp is the most flammable forest-type in the Mediterranean

He also noted that, in summer, the island’s winds typically blow from north to south – the same direction as the road from the camp, which is currently the only evacuation route.

According to Thomas Cova, a wildfire evacuation expert and professor of human geography at the University of Utah, a mass evacuation from the proposed location, even with a viable access road, would be “nearly impossible”. “I don’t think an evacuation is feasible,” Cova said. “If you have a thousand-plus people, you wouldn’t have the vehicles to move them and it’s too far from the coast to use a boat.”

The only viable option, according to Cova, is for camp residents to shelter in place. This would require Greek authorities to clear enough vegetation to create a minimum ten-metre gap between the camp and the forest. Creating a camp large enough to safely fit thousands of residents could be a challenge, however, and the risk of smoke inhalation remains.

Related story
15 December 2021 | Zübeyir Koculu , Anu Shukla
Exclusive: Turkish nationals claim they were illegally put in boats by Greek authorities and returned to Turkey, where they risked persecution

Other problems


The camp’s planned location presents other potential problems. It is several kilometres from the nearest town, and residents’ access to basic services such as grocery shopping and legal aid could be severely limited. The European Commission’s home affairs office told openDemocracy that it expected the Greek authorities to ensure asylum seekers could travel to and from town.

Meanwhile, the potential health risks associated with living so close to a landfill site remain unclear.

Some aid groups remain sceptical. In an email to openDemocracy, Carolien Sloof, field coordinator at the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) project in Lesbos, said the planned camp demonstrates “how securitisation and border control has taken precedence over respect of the dignity, protection and the health of people who seek asylum in Greece”.

“MSF teams have witnessed and documented the human cost of containment on the Greek islands,” Sloof said. “EU bodies, member states and Greece should refrain from inflicting further harm on people seeking safety in Europe for political purposes. This starts with refraining from building centres that will only trap people in prison-like settings on the Greek islands; and rather focus on humane and dignified policies of reception.”
10 global crises to pay attention to in 2022, according to 'The New Humanitarian'

AID NPR
January 11, 2022
JOANNE LU

Roqia Qasqari, 47, who lives in Gero village in Afghanistan's Bamyan Province, has a stockpile of potatoes from an earlier harvest. In 2021, her province and others experienced severe drought, jeopardizing the food supply. Hunger will continue to be an issue in Afghanistan and around the globe in 2022, especially for communities dealing with overlapping crises.
Stefani Glinski/The New Humanitarian

With the ongoing pandemic and the rise of the omicron variant, it's easy to forget that the world isn't battling other major crises right now.

But for The New Humanitarian, an independent nonprofit media outlet that covers conflict and disasters, these "other crises" are always top of mind.

In December, the outlet published its annual list of 10 global crises and trends that it will be watching in 2022. It's been compiling the list for the past five years to spotlight problems likely to drive humanitarian need in the months ahead.

To compile the rundown, The New Humanitarian reached out to analysts, aid workers and reporters from more than 60 countries. This year's list consists of:

The pandemic's poverty and equality hangover

Social media's hate problem

Afghanistan, Haiti, Myanmar: Political upheaval, humanitarian challenges

West vs. the rest: Roadblocks for those seeking asylum

Hunger

Mercenaries and their humanitarian costs

The hidden health risks of climate change

Ethiopia: Endless obstacles to aid

Latin America: Turbulent politics meets COVID fallout

All eyes on the city of Marib, the center of Yemen's conflict

NPR spoke to Josephine Schmidt, The New Humanitarian's Geneva-based executive editor who helped compile the list, about her worries — and hopes — for the year ahead. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you decide which crises make the cut?

It is difficult to compile these lists of crises because you don't want to get into a contest of misery and say, "Well, this crisis deserves to be one of the top 10 and that one doesn't." So we don't do a ranked list.

But what we did was put together a list of crises and topics that we feel attention must be paid to — either because of the sheer scale or because they are hidden or forgotten.

There are so many ongoing crises that get very little media attention and get far from enough financial assistance. We feel it is our duty to bring those crises to the attention of readers.

YouTube
What was the most surprising thing on this year's list?


It was very eye-opening to realize how deep and long-felt the reverberations of the pandemic may be, especially for communities dealing with overlapping crises. We call it the pandemic's "hangover effects."

The financial and social impacts of the pandemic are not only making poverty and existing inequality worse, but they're also contributing to unprecedented levels of hunger. Just the sheer scale, depth and breadth of hunger in 2021 really surpassed what we would have imagined.

The pandemic seems to be affecting other crises on the list.

Pandemic lockdowns and supply chain and transport difficulties have also made it more difficult to provide aid in places experiencing conflict right now, including Ethiopia, Haiti and Yemen.

For so many people, when – or if – the pandemic ends, life won't suddenly become less complicated. The pandemic has created deeper need that's going to be difficult to dig out of.

Demonstrators hold a Colombian flag in Plaza Bolívar in the centre of the capital, Bogotá, on May 1, 2021.
Mariano Vimos/The New Humanitarian

Your list mentions that the pandemic has delivered a particularly devastating blow to Latin America.

More than 30% of COVID-19 deaths have been in Latin America, home to a bit more than 8% of the world's population.

Think of the lives capsized by those deaths alone: families losing wage earners, kids orphaned or forced to leave school to work. Jobs lost to the pandemic have pushed millions into poverty, and millions of others have fallen out of the middle class. Hunger is also rising faster than any other part of the world.

Anything that's taken you by surprise?

One thing that hit harder and faster than we expected was the difficulties with aid access in Ethiopia [which is in its second year of civil war].

In Ethiopia, the very public and sustained vitriol toward aid workers and agencies from the government and its opponents has been alarming. Aid workers have been called spies and terrorists. More than 20 aid workers have been killed. Aid groups have been kicked out.

And civilians pay the price. More than 9 million are hungry in northern Ethiopia alone, with hundreds of thousands edging toward famine, according to the U.N. And in the south and east of the country, the U.N. says that drought will leave another 6 million people in need of assistance this year.

Residents walk past an abandoned tank on a main road in Amhara region, Ethiopia, in 2021, where hundreds of thousands of people have fled recent fighting — and in need of humanitarian assistance.
Maria Gerth-Niculescu/The New Humanitarian

Hunger has been on your list for several years. Have there been any improvements?

I do think there is a glimmer of hope. At the first U.N. Food Systems Summit in September, there were a number of commitments made by world leaders to build more sustainable, equitable and green food systems. If talk translates to action, then those commitments offer some hope for increasing food security globally and reducing hunger.

The New Humanitarian is known for original reporting on humanitarian crises, sometimes in conflict zones. It must be difficult in the best of times. How are you managing during the pandemic?

Due to the pandemic and increased danger in conflict zones, we have had to be very creative in the way we report. When our staff cannot get into places ourselves, we work with local journalists or local citizens via WhatsApp or other [virtual] means.

We really feel the best stories are told by people in and from the communities in which the stories are taking place. So even if we send in our own reporters, we make sure they are not only working with local translators and fixers but also local reporters.


Hundreds of people living in a refugee camp in Aubervilliers near Paris in 2020 were later evicted and sent by bus to reception centers in the Île de France region, before bulldozers razed the settlement to the ground.
Paloma Laudet/The New Humanitarian

What are you looking forward to in 2022?


I look forward to upending the idea that humanitarian news is only about what's broken, what's wrong and what's overwhelmingly hopeless.

For example ...

We've done stories on how women in South Sudan are leading peace-building efforts and how women's groups operating with little to no funding in Colombia are supporting victims of gender-based violence.

Many of the answers to these crises are found in the local communities that are experiencing these problems. We need to ask and listen to them.

How do you regroup after a long day of covering crises?

I take a long, unplugged walk to nowhere in particular. Or at least think about doing that.


Joanne Lu is a freelance journalist who covers global poverty and inequity. Her work has appeared in Humanosphere, The Guardian, Global Washington and War is Boring. Follow her on Twitter: @joannelu
UK
Hadrian's Wall under threat from climate change on 1900th birthday

By Cameron Hill & AP • Updated: 20/02/2022 - 19:36

Dr. Andrew Birley inspects a well near Hadrian's Wall, UK - 
 Copyright AP Photo

For almost two millennia, it has withstood man and beast. But, as it celebrates its 1,900th anniversary this year, archaeologists fear it may be facing its most dangerous foe: climate change.

Hadrian’s Wall, located in northern England, is a Roman fortification stretching from coast to coast. It served as a marker of the north-westerly frontier of the Roman Empire.

Archaeologist Bill Griffiths says it is a striking example of the longevity of structures built by the Romans.

"So Hadrian's Wall is an incredible monument, it runs right across England coast-to-coast 73 modern miles, 80 Roman miles long and you set that in context against other Roman marvels like the Colosseum, the Pantheon and things like that," he notes.

"Everyone knows it, everyone has heard of Hadrian's Wall - it is a real landmark."

Fact check: Have we really avoided the ‘worst case’ climate change scenarios?

The French and German coastal regions on the climate change frontline

Hadrian’s Wall and its surroundings have long been a rich area of discovery for archaeologists. Many artefacts and treasures have been pristinely preserved in the peat bogs that dominate the landscape.

But climate change has caused these peat bogs to shrink back and dry up.

A well, for example, was hidden underground 30 years ago, but the shrinking bog has left the well exposed in the open air, and vulnerable to complete destruction.

Archaeologists are all too aware that uncovering valuable Roman treasures from this site has become a race against time.

"So 1,900 years ago Hadrian's Wall was built to separate the country and to protect the Roman province of Britain, well quite frankly it's never been under as great a threat as it was then as it is now today through climate change," says Dr Andrew Birley.

"We've got these sensitive areas of archaeology which are under extreme threat from climate change, those small temperature changes which are now increasing to big temperature changes really have the power to damage the preservation of what's going on here."

So, while the world considers how climate change will affect our future, Hadrian's Wall shows the impact it is already having on our past.
UAE drone conference warns of rising threat


Debris of Iranian-made Ababil drones displayed in 2018 in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi -- the Emirati armed forces said the devices were used by Huthi rebels in Yemen against Saudi-led coalition forces -

by Mohamad Ali Harissi
February 20, 2022 — Abu Dhabi (AFP)

The UAE and its allies warned Sunday of the rising threat of drone attacks, as Middle East militants rapidly acquire a taste for the cheap and easily accessible unmanned systems.

But while the countries called for a collective effort to protect airspaces against the small and often hard to detect targets, one question remained: how to easily stop a drone attack?

"We have to unite to prevent the use of drones from threatening civilian safety and destroying economic institutions," Mohammed bin Ahmed al-Bowardi, United Arab Emirates' Minister of State for Defence Affairs, said at a defence conference in Abu Dhabi.

The Unmanned Systems Exhibition (UMEX), running until Wednesday, began in the UAE capital with regional and Western military and industry representatives, including from the United States, Britain and France.

Speakers addressed the importance of developing such systems for civil and military uses but also acknowledged their dangers when used by groups deemed a threat to the region.

While the event will showcase the latest in high-tech drone technology, the host country warned that such weapons are becoming cheaper and more widespread.

They are now part of the arsenals of "terrorist groups that use the systems to terrorise civilians or to impact the global system in a negative way," said the UAE's Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Omar bin Sultan al-Olama.

"That is a challenge that requires us to... work together to ensure that we can create a shield against the use of these systems."

The UAE is part of a Saudi-led military coalition that has been fighting in Yemen since 2015 to support the government against Iran-backed Huthi rebels.

While the Emirates announced it withdrew its troops from the country in 2019, it remains an influential player, backing fighters there.

The UAE has been on heightened alert since a Huthi drone and missile attack killed three oil workers in Abu Dhabi on January 17. Authorities have since thwarted three similar attacks, including one claimed by a little-known militant group believed to have ties with pro-Iran armed factions in Iraq.

The UAE's staunch ally the United States has deployed a warship and fighter planes to help protect the Middle East financial and leisure hub, usually a safe haven in the volatile region.

France also said it would bolster its defence cooperation with the UAE, mostly in securing its air space.

In December, the Saudi-led coalition said the Huthis had fired more than 850 attack drones and 400 ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia in the past seven years, killing a total of 59 civilians.

That figure compares with the 401 coalition air raids carried out in January alone over Yemen, according to the Yemen Data Project, an independent tracker which reported around 9,000 civilian fatalities from the strikes in that country since 2015.

Last year the United States and Israel said an Iranian drone attacked a ship managed by an Israeli billionaire as it sailed off Oman. Two crew members were killed.

More recently, Israel's military said its air defences fired at a drone that had crossed into its airspace from Lebanon on Friday, the second such intrusion in as many days.

- Integrating AI -


Such incidents have again raised concerns about the dangers of bomb-laden drones. Some are difficult for radars to detect and require a complex process to shoot down without causing casualties from falling shrapnel.

These are concerns and challenges that "our adversaries" do not have, said Major General Sean A. Gainey, US Army director of the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office.

"They're rapidly purchasing this stuff off the shelf, redesign it, taking the great technology that's being developed for good, and then employing it" for other purposes, he said.

One way of countering a drone attack is to integrate artificial intelligence in air defense systems.

"They can detect a target through some form of AI, track that target and ultimately defeat that target," Gainey said, adding: "AI is going to be a key component to the counter-UAS fight."



SEMIOTICS OF WAR
Something to believe in: signifiers, symbols and Russia’s national ideology



Terms like ‘Great Patriotic War’ and ‘Russian world’ carry a heavy symbolic load and are imbued with meanings that adapt to serve political goals


Natalia Savelyeva
15 February 2022

A monument to Georgy Zhukov, a Second World War Soviet
 military commander, in Moscow |
(c) ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved

In December 2021 the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a list of demands to NATO and the US. It proposed pulling back NATO troops from eastern Europe and urged that there should be no further membership additions from within Russia’s ‘sphere of influence’, referring to Ukraine and Georgia.

Since then, the whole world has become preoccupied with the possibility of a new Russian invasion in Ukraine. Although nobody knows what the Russian president is thinking, some of the arguments for or against the likelihood of military action reflect how Russians themselves view the possibility of war, and how an invasion could affect their political attitudes and support for Vladimir Putin.

Yet there is a remarkable ambiguity in the emotions and opinions expressed in the Russian media regarding a possible conflict with Ukraine.

In late December, Dmitry Kiselev, a provocative TV host and head of the government-owned international news agency Russia Today, promised that if Ukraine ever joined NATO or if NATO developed military infrastructure in the country, “We will hold a gun to America’s head.” The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, meanwhile, officially declared on 27 January: “We have repeatedly stated that our country is not going to attack anyone. We consider unacceptable even the idea of a war between our peoples.” The next day Margorita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia Today, opened a press conference with an alarming question to the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, which she claimed came from her social media subscribers: “When are we going to bomb Washington?” To which Lavrov replied: “If it depends on the Russian Federation, there will be no war. We don’t want wars. But we will not let them ignore our interests.”

Finally, according to recent polls, 53% of respondents in Russia in December 2021 believed there would be no war between Russia and Ukraine, while 39% claimed the opposite. Despite this spread of opinion, respondents displayed solidarity over one point: that it is the US and NATO that are responsible for dragging Russia into war – a war which Russians are afraid of, but prepared for.

Russian President Vladimir Putin | Source: Kremlin.ru

The Great Patriotic War and the Russian psyche


Since the start of the war in Donbas in 2014, two logically contradictory ideas have coexisted peacefully in the minds of Russian citizens: ‘If only there were no war,’ and ‘We can repeat it!’ Both refer to the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s term for the Second World War, and the second slogan refers to the Soviet military campaign against Nazi Germany.

How does this strange double mindset work and why does it exist at all? Is it part of some strange Russian ideology, and if so, can it mobilise people in the case of real conflict? Right now we can only guess about the potential impact of this twisted worldview. But back in 2014, Russians mobilised in order to defend the ‘Russian world’, travelling to southeastern Ukraine to build a ‘New Russia’ (Novorossiya) and fight ‘the West’, in an effort to repeat the heroism of their grandparents and parents during the Second World War.

Drawing on data from interviews with Donbas combatants, collected in 2016-2017 in Donbas, Moscow and St Petersburg by me and my colleagues from the Public Sociology Laboratory, an independent sociological initiative, I explored how these contradictory ideas can coexist. Is there any ideology that defines Russian discourse about the war in Donbas? And how does this ideology operate at the grassroots level? In other words, how does ideology impact the decisions of ordinary people directly involved in the conflict?
Ideology as myth, and myth as ideology

Sometimes ideology is a story. Communist ideology in the Soviet Union was one. It gave an exhaustive explanation for human history from the beginning of time until the 20th century, explaining the reasons and the forces behind political events and human behaviour. It had its heroes, the proletariat, and villains, the capitalists. And it had its own sense of time – from oppression to communism, from a dark past to a bright future through struggle.

Nationalist ideologies are usually stories as well. They often tell us how the ‘golden age’ of a glorious nation came to an end at the hand of invaders who contaminated the pure blood and high moral standards of its people, and how it is necessary to fight an enemy to restore that lost greatness.

Sometimes an ideology is what theorist Roland Barthes called a myth: a sort of parasite that takes already existing semiotic systems – whether images, stories or performances – and drains them, investing already-existing signifiers with new meanings. One famous example he citeds was a cover of Paris Match magazine, featuring a photograph of a young Black soldier saluting the French flag. Barthes reported how he saw beyond the image itself to what he believed it was intended to signify: the greatness of a French imperialism that united people irrespective of race.

Sometimes ideology includes both narratives and general, vague concepts, combining them in different ways.

In Russia, the combination of narrative and ambiguous concepts seems unique: the meaning of common words and phrases like ‘the West’, the ‘Russian World’ (the concept of a broader community of Russian language, culture and spirituality outside of the country), ‘fascists’, and even the ‘Great Patriotic War’ have eroded. The words themselves can thus be filled with different meanings depending on the political circumstances and the people who use them. Intrinsically vague, these phrases are able to conjure up a cause, a devotion and a sense of unity across society. We saw this with Donbas in 2014, we observe it now and we will probably see it many times in the future.

To explain how these common words and phrases work and what Russian ideology in action looks like, I want to look at three big ‘empty signifiers’ – the ‘Great Patriotic War’, the ‘Russian World’, and ‘Novorossiya’ – used to make sense of Donbas conflict by its immediate participants, local and Russian combatants.

A militant of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic" |
 (с) REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved

Novorossiya, the Russian world and the Great Patriotic War

There are several groups of fighters who had more or less consistent narratives about their involvement in the war and the war itself: Donbas citizens who had some measure of financial stability; fighters from both Russia and Ukraine who had already fought in other post-Soviet conflicts; and activists (or ex-activists) from Russia with nationalist-leftist views.

For many Donbas residents, the idea, promoted in part by the Russian media, that the Donbas conflict is a repetition of the Great Patriotic War, became the main source for making sense of events of 2013-2014. Detailed stories about relatives who fought or wound up in captivity during the 1940s framed stories of their own mobilisation. “My father was a defender of Leningrad. My wife’s relatives also took part in the Great Patriotic War. A week after the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine was occupied [in our town], I was here, on the barricades,” a 63-year-old Donbas resident told me.

Being the successors of Soviet heroes, combatants believed they fought against the successors of the ‘Banderites’, Ukrainian nationalist guerillas from the 1940s, only now backed by US and the West, who did not understand what kind of evil they were feeding. This narrative mixing of present and past negated the need to articulate any other reasons to join the conflict: “I am a Soviet person/My father was a defender of Leningrad/My mother was in captivity – of course I joined the fight.” During the chaos of 2014, to fight with the same enemy in the same place for the same reason as one’s parents or grandparents became a sort of a moral obligation. The real fear, the feeling of alienation from a new Ukrainian state which was emerging after the Euromaidan revolution, and the resulting resentment many experienced was masked by two other popular concepts – the ‘Russian World’ and ‘Novorossiya’.

Combatants who had fought in other conflicts prior to 2014 simply loved war, I found. For them, although they used the same words to talk about war as local Donbas citizens without any previous military experience, the whole conflict looked different. In their world view, the Second World War and events in Donbas – along with the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conflicts that emerged in its aftermath – were simply episodes in the long-running antagonism between Russia and the West.

April 2014. Barricades in front of the Donetsk regional administration building 
| (c) Mark Pourel / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved

“The Western world... will never wish us well, they always had the task to destroy us, for thousands of years, damn, starting with Alexander the Great and the ancient Romans,” one 33-year-old fighter told me. In this historical chain of events spanning more than a thousand years, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was considered another link. The current conflict in Ukraine, and the necessity to join it, were justified by the idea that if “Ukraine [is] torn apart, it would be Russia’s turn next”.

If Donbas locals referred to the ‘Russian World” in an attempt to articulate their vision of a ‘normal life’ without the Ukrainian nationalist threat, for the experienced fighters, the ‘Russian World’ referred to people, spirit and culture. This world could be found everywhere and include anybody regardless of his or her ethnicity, nationality or personal preferences – very much in line with Putin’s joke that “Russia’s borders end nowhere”.

For this second group of combatants, Novorossiya was, ultimately, just one territory – their ambitions extended well beyond it. They dreamed of recreating Russia in its imperial borders as they existed before 1917, as one combatant told me. This vision was very different from that of the local fighters, for whom Novorossiya (a term most of them never heard before 2014) remained a possible future for Ukraine, and one in which Donbas could find its place.

But there was a third group of combatants, mostly Russian nationalists of different sorts, for whom Novorossiya constituted the main goal of the war and the main reason they joined it. For them, the ‘Russian World’ was an ideational entity, everything they wanted to believe in, but were not able to make a reality in Putin’s Russia. The idea of Novorossiya became a container for this unsatisfied desire, a real chance to build the society they were not able to create in Russia.

As one 36-year-old Russian man explained: “Why did many people go to the Donbas? It was the idea of Novorossiya itself. It’s clear that it was utopian, that... there was still some little hope that it’s possible to create some kind of island, an island of true freedom, free from… this system, to create something new. Here. I would move there, with my family. There should be social justice, no oligarchs and bribed cops… Free bread, free air and the blossoming of culture like a wild tree. Liberty, equality, fraternity, in the best sense.”

For representatives of this last group, the Great Patriotic War was an event of the past – a lost opportunity to be a hero, while the Donbas conflict gave them a real chance to act as heroes in the here and now.

Ambiguous terms, multiple meanings


How did these terms become so ambiguous, carrying so many different layers of meaning? Here, it’s important to note that different parties did not fight to promote their vision via discussion. What we see here is not different interpretations of the same phenomenon. Novorossiya, the Russian World and the Great Patriotic War appear in both public and private narratives as floating signifiers. They are not completely empty, but they are empty enough to serve political goals, to be filled and refilled depending on the need of the day.

In the Soviet period, Novorossiya referred to a particular territory, which was synonymous with the Russian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and now constitutes Ukrainian territory in the south-east of the country. In 1994 it reemerged among Transnistrian separatists, and then finally appeared in Russian public discourse in 2014, already carrying multiple ideological meanings to justify Russian involvement in the conflict. The concept of the ‘Russian World’ never had any concrete referent – no particular territory, social group, or historical event. Its meaning has been defined entirely by its political usage. Finally, the Great Patriotic War has proven to be the most ‘politically usable’ element of Russia’s past in recent decades, due to its versatility and capacity to fit various cultural frames, ranging from ‘heroic sacrifice’, ‘national glory’, ‘defence of freedom’, and ‘salvation of civilisation’ to ‘mass suffering’, ‘unrecoverable losses’ and ‘national victimhood’. Being loaded with meanings and intentionally expanded, these concepts became perfectly suitable for any new political adventure.

Radical ambiguity is not only the fate of these three concepts, which were so useful at the beginning of the Donbas conflict. Some of them, like Novorossiya, have practically exited the political scene, at least for now; others, like the Great Patriotic War, continue to carry a heavy symbolic load and political importance – they have too much meaning to simply disappear. ‘Fascists’ and ‘the West’ are still with us and not going to leave Russian public discourse and people’s imagination any time soon. Explaining the role of propaganda in 2014, Peter Pomerantsev wrote that propaganda reinvented reality, producing mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. However, it is not only that new political entities appear and disappear whenever the Russian political establishment needs it.

The increased use of political language due to the vagueness and emptiness of commonly used political concepts has become even more visible in Russia in recent years. Now almost any activity can be qualified as ‘political’ (and thus any organisation or person be declared a ‘foreign agent’ or ‘extremist’). This extremely ambiguous language hides genuine worries and produces fake solidarities. In 2014, feelings of fear and insecurity disappeared behind the slogans ‘We can repeat’ and ‘We fight for Novorossiya’. The unity of popular support for Putin and regular people arose when ‘the Russian people’ (including those who did not want to be Russian at all) opposed themselves to the mysterious ‘West’.

Eight years on, what kind of story can we tell with words whose very meanings mutate and escape? With concepts which, like Putin’s imagined Russia, have no borders? If it is true that the future of Russia is history, then it is also true that this history is just a fantasy. A fantasy we can easily fill with any meaning we choose. This is a story of ‘forever’ and ‘always’, where nothing ever changes – Russia, the West, war. Nothing new happens in this story and everything remains; of a country stuck in nowhere, lost in a time-loop, where the imagined and reimagined past constantly repeats itself. This language – ambiguous, vague and boundaryless – is perfect for creating an impression of stability that lasts forever. Paradoxically, this is similar to the feeling that many regular Soviet citizens had in the years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some things can last forever, it seems, until they are no more.
PPE from VIP companies three times more likely to be unfit for purpose

Nearly 60% of the PPE procured from firms linked to the UK government was unusable – sparking fresh questions about controversial ‘VIP’ lane


Adam Bychawski
17 February 2022

£3.3bn of PPE was unsuitable for use in the NHS or defective. |
PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

PPE supplied through the government’s controversial ‘VIP’ lane was three times more likely to be useless to the NHS than normally procured PPE, analysis by openDemocracy has revealed.


The government spent £1.7bn on masks, gowns and other items of PPE from 50 companies referred through its ‘VIP’ lane, meaning they were awarded contracts after being recommended by MPs, ministers, peers or health officials. More than half of this (59%) – supplied by 25 of the firms – was never used, equivalent to £1bn wasted.

In comparison, the proportion of unfit PPE supplied by non-VIP companies was significantly lower. Of the £10.4bn spent on PPE from suppliers that did not come through the VIP channel, £1.8bn (17%) has been unused.

In total, £2.8bn was spent on 1.9 billion items of unused PPE, according to figures from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) that were obtained by Spotlight on Corruption through a Freedom of Information request. The department did not explain why the PPE was unused by the NHS, but said not all of it was defective.

Among the 127 companies on the department’s overall list of PPE suppliers is Meller Designs, which the DHSC revealed in November was processed through the VIP lane after being referred as a potential PPE supplier by Michael Gove’s office.

The company was at the time co-owned by David Meller, who has donated more than £63,000 to the Conservative Party since 2009 – including £3,250 to support Gove’s party leadership bid in 2016, a campaign on which Meller worked as chair of finance. Some 552,100 items, costing £8.5m, supplied by the firm were unused.

Also on the list is PPE MedPro, which supplied more than 25.5 million items, worth £124.6m, that were not used. The company was referred to the VIP lane by Baroness Mone, a Conservative peer, just weeks after it was set up. Last month, The Guardian reported that leaked documents appear to suggest that Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, were secretly involved in the business.

Lawyers for Mone said she had no “association” with the company or the process by which it was awarded its PPE contract, while Barrowman’s lawyers said he “never had any role or function in PPE Medpro”

George Havenhand, a senior legal researcher at Spotlight on Corruption, said that the millions wasted on unused PPE from VIP lane companies was “an extraordinary indictment of government decision-making and due diligence”.

“It is essential that the government is fully transparent about what went wrong and what steps it has taken to recoup its losses, and that lessons are learned for the government’s new procurement framework,” he added.

The government broke the law with its VIP procurement process, the high court ruled last month, following a challenge by the Good Law Project and Every Doctor.

Justice O’Farrell found that two companies – PestFix and Ayanda – were unlawfully awarded PPE contracts through the VIP process. Together they supplied £225m worth of PPE that was unused, according to figures from DHSC. It is not known how much PPE they supplied that was used, if any.

In a written judgement, O’Farrell said: “There is evidence that opportunities were treated as high priority even where there were no objectively justifiable grounds for expediting the offer.”

Today’s figures on wasted PPE pale in comparison to the losses the DHSC revealed in its 2020-21 annual report earlier this month.

The report showed that the department squandered almost £10bn of the £12.1bn it spent on PPE. This was due to purchasing defective, unsuitable or overpriced equipment as it scrambled to meet unprecedented demand at the start of the pandemic.

A DHSC spokesperson said: “At the height of the pandemic, there was a desperate need for PPE to protect health and social care staff and the government rightly took swift and decisive action to secure it.

“The purpose of the high-priority lane was to efficiently prioritise credible offers of PPE, and our efforts helped secure vital equipment to protect healthcare workers during the pandemic, with 97% of PPE we ordered being suitable for use.”

It is unclear how the department calculated this figure. According to the DHSC’s own annual report, of the £12.1bn the government spent on PPE, £3.3bn worth was unsuitable for use in the NHS or defective. A further £750m was surplus to requirements and £5.9bn was written off because the department overpaid or could not cancel unsuitable orders.
The truth about modern slavery offenders

Most people convicted of a trafficking or modern slavery offence are a long way from having Crime Boss on their CV

David Gadd & Rose Broad
17 February 2022

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel |
Barbara Cook/Alamy Stock Photo. 

As the 2021 Borders and Nationality Bill is debated within the UK’s House of Lords, NGOs representing victims of modern slavery are campaigning to have part five of the legislation removed. In a brutal extension of the hostile environment policy, this section: introduces the premise of ‘trauma deadlines’ which deny victims of trafficking access to support if they do not share details of their abuse quickly enough; raises the thresholds against which the veracity of the claims of potential victims of trafficking will be tested while reducing the circumstances in which leave to remain will be granted; and seeks to disqualify those victims who have committed crimes or who represent a “threat to public order” from protection.


The position of the British Home Office is that such harsh remedies are required to "break the business model" of organised criminal networks of people smugglers and traffickers, whose profiteering has driven an “alarming rise” in “child rapists, people who pose a threat to national security, serious criminals and failed asylum seekers … abusing our modern slavery system”. How exactly making life harder for people who have been exploited will break the business model of organised crime is difficult to fathom. Global inequality and immigration policy ‘organise’ the illicit markets for irregular migration and labour exploitation far more than criminals ever could, and the “business model” of those who facilitate illegal entry into the UK – if there is one – is simply to turn the government’s distaste for migrants into an opportunity for profit. Continuing to fortify the walls only supports this model. It doesn’t dismantle it.

Further questions must be asked about who the people convicted of trafficking and modern slavery offenses actually are, and whether it is accurate to characterise them as ‘gang members’ or ‘organised criminals’ at all. For if that characterisation doesn’t hold, it’s difficult to understand what the Borders and Nationality Bill could effectively “break”, no matter how draconian it is. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that most of those being depicted as posing an imminent threat to the UK’s security are not what popular culture would have us believe.

Mr Bigs, profiting substantially from organised crime, are only a tiny minority of those convicted.

Between 2018 and 2021 we interviewed 21 men and nine women convicted of smuggling and modern slavery offences in the UK. They were implicated in: trafficking for sexual exploitation; arranging or entering into sham or forced marriages; keeping people in domestic servitude; facilitating illegal entry into the UK; labour exploitation; exploiting vulnerable people to supply illicit drugs; and supplying food, drugs or alcohol in exchange for labour or sex to vulnerable and/or young people. From a criminal justice perspective they were serious offenders, and all but one were serving prison sentences from six months to 12 years.

Yet our research shows that their motives did not fit neatly with the narrative being used by the Home Office to justify the provisions of the Borders and Nationality Bill. Mr Bigs, profiting substantially from organised crime, are only a tiny minority of those convicted of people smuggling, people trafficking, and modern slavery offences in the UK. Many are substitutable actors within chains of migration. Quite a few are destitute people who are also victims of exploitation, while others are actually British business people failing to ensure compliance with immigration regulations.

Serious and organised criminals?


A small subsample of the men we interviewed did fit the stereotypes of organised criminals to some degree. Idris, for example, was a former Nigerian police chief who had hired destitute people to smuggle drugs across international borders, all while being protected by serving officers back home. Darius was a former Romanian police officer who laundered money, including some that derived from the international proceeds of sex work. And John had been the muscle for protection rackets in metropolitan nightclubs before he took a job smuggling people from Paris into the UK.

But these three men were not necessarily typical of those convicted of modern slavery offences – around a quarter of whom are women. Nor were they those serving the longest sentences. More common were individuals simply caught on the wrong side of 21st century globalisation, and many had had their lives destroyed by the legacies of colonialism before the UK added destitution and the threat of deportation to their lists of injury.


Rasheed, for example, was serving 12 years for purchasing a sham marriage. He had grown up in indentured labour on the Pakistan/Afghan border and first came to the UK on a tourist visa. Once here he became a victim of acute exploitation in a British off-licence, where he both worked and lived to send money home. He told us that he was tricked into paying for a marriage to avoid being deported. Similarly, Estelle, a woman from Cape Verde, was pushed to arrange sham marriages between Nigerian men and Portuguese women in order to pay off her significant gambling debts. She received four years in prison.

Vicki was a UK national in her 20s serving seven years in prison for exploiting others via county lines drug dealing. After losing her mother to cancer as a young teenager and being expelled from school, Vicki left her hometown at 14 to live in the care of her brother. The two of them were persuaded by an uncle to become involved in distributing drugs as a way to avoid becoming homeless.

While we could go on, there isn't space to relate the life stories of all 30 individuals here. Instead, we will focus on three groups often singled out in the justifications for new the Borders and Nationality Bill: sex traffickers, people smugglers, and labour exploiters.
Sex traffickers


Among those who were found guilty of trafficking adults for the purpose of sexual exploitation, all claimed to be working with sex workers who understood the nature of the work they had committed to. They also claimed that, where foreign nationals were involved, they had come to the UK in search of better pay after first undertaking sex work in their countries of origin. Only one interviewee appeared to be physically forcing women to sell themselves.

That was Adam, a Hungarian national, who had taken his sexual partner’s passport after he “rescued” her from another family in the UK who were sexually exploiting her and selling her into a “sham marriage”. Adam subsequently physically assaulted this woman after she did “bad things” like “smoking drugs” and as a reminder that she needed to pay her way in the house where he and his family lived, either by undertaking sex work or completing domestic chores. The exploited woman eventually “grassed” on Adam and his family, providing the evidence that led to their conviction.

The stories told by convicted people smugglers, though also troubling reflections of a globally unequal world, were morally comprehensible.

Conversely, Faziel considered himself to be running an elite “escort service”. Some of the Thai women involved were able business women, though others, it materialised, were less successful and vulnerable to exploitation. Andrei, a Romanian heroin user, who came to the UK partly in search of drug treatment, designed websites for the women who lived with their male partners in a house he shared. And Anton, another Romanian who had worked in low paid agricultural and construction work in Western Europe, was little more than a low paid taxi driver for women travelling between sex work jobs and/or the airport. This included driving his partner, who described herself as a “masseur” and who was working in the sex industry to finance her cancer treatment.

Two of the three women interviewed in this category were former sex workers. Grace and Sandra had become brothel keepers partly to establish better working environments for themselves and other women, and in Grace’s case also to escape domestic servitude. Nina, who also ran a brothel, did so in collaboration with a male partner who had subjected her to near lethal domestic abuse.
People smugglers

The stories told by convicted people smugglers, though troubling reflections of a globally unequal world, were, to varying degrees, morally comprehensible. Bob and John, both men with long histories of criminal involvement and prison records, were two smugglers who drove foreign nationals across borders. They were aware that travel debts would have to be repaid on arrival, but saw little wrong in helping people who were coming to work. Neither was involved in exploiting those people who entered the UK and both were appalled to learn others did so. They were simply “drivers”.

Others thought it was right to help fellow refugees like themselves. Alesandro, for example, was a long-term unemployed Albanian refugee with a history of post-traumatic stress disorder from his time as a teenage combatant in the Balkans. He went to collect clothing from a lorry as a favour to a man who had lent him money to pay for his brother’s medical care. How genuine his “surprise” was when he discovered the lorry contained not clothes but other Eastern European migrants was hard to gauge in the interview. Regardless, he saw them as refugees with similar backgrounds of trauma and destitution to his own and thought it right to give them a hand.

Others charged with smuggling offences claimed to have been duped into transporting undocumented migrants, either because they did not know their passengers were hiding in their vehicles, or because the passengers convinced them they had a right to enter the UK until this was challenged by border enforcement officers.
Labour exploiters

Among those involved in hiring workers who became exploited, one shopkeeper and landlord, Sammy, saw himself as doing a favour to his British and Eastern European tenants, offering them small amounts of work and “leftover food” from his takeaway shop. A married couple, both of whom worked very long hours as public sector professionals, thought they had done a “good” thing by bringing two destitute Nigerian teenagers to work for them as domestic helpers to care for their children. The young women were provided with the prospect of an education and money to send back home. The tide turned when the young women presented themselves as ‘victims of modern slavery’, which they possibly did because they had been denied a right to remain in the UK and because some of their earnings were paid directly to their fathers. And Charles, the staffing lead of an international logistics company and the only participant who had not served a prison sentence, had failed to explore the terms under which Romanian migrant labour was supplied to a meat processing factory where profit margins were tight.

So what is the truth about modern slavery offenders?

In The Truth About Modern Slavery, Emily Kenway, the former policy adviser to the UK's first Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, explains how:

Modern slavery as a metaphor for severe exploitation and as a political frame constructs a way of seeing that makes us blind to things we need to know. By characterising severe exploitation as exceptional … it also produces ... moral legitimacy for the very policies that enable severe exploitation in the first place. (p.9)

We concur with Kenway’s analysis, but think there are further considerations to add with regard to the very small number of offenders convicted of such offences. Contrary to what the architects of modern slavery policy have asserted, modern slavery offenders are not a coherent group with common motives reducible to “evil” or “organised crime gangs”. Their offending cannot be reduced to a singular cause or deterred by tough talk and hostile immigration policies, however much politicians might wish it to be.

One reason why some modern slavery offenders fail to recognise the stark choices victims face is that they have quite serious histories of social disadvantage of their own, including childhood abuse, drug use, post-traumatic stress disorder, unmanageable debts, substance dependencies, and experiences of also being exploited. This subgroup of offenders are victims too, illustrating that unless we support victims adequately we risk increasing the number of people desperate enough to consider exploiting others.

Other perpetrators of modern slavery include business people working at the margins of legality, or within firms that lack the capacity to compete in certain industries when immigration rules change. Some of the individuals we talked to had attempted to reach out to regulators or law enforcement before they were arrested. The responses they received, however, merely confirmed a need to cover up what was happening to protect co-workers, including migrant workers at risk of deportation. This suggests that there is much to be gained from trying to support and regulate legitimate businesses that are hiring migrant workers and/or working in industries where margins have become tight, particularly when regulatory or employment frameworks change.

Modern slavery discourse has so thoroughly blinded us that we now need to speak to those cast as ‘evil perpetrators’ to appreciate how UK policies enable severe exploitation.

A truth about the sex trafficking of adults, as Kenway also argues, is that sex work is primarily undertaken by women who see few other means of meeting their financial needs. In order to do this in countries where sex workers have no rights, they have to rely on others to provide transport, accommodation, IT support and physical security: people who inevitably do so on their own terms in an industry that is unregulated because it is illicit.

A truth about labour exploitation is that it typically involves the underpayment of people who, like sex workers, lack employment rights and/or owe money to the people who facilitated their journeys. It is this lack of protection that blurs the line between smuggling and the exploitation that is definitive of ‘trafficking’. The reasons why those who are exploited become so indebted is not reducible to the greed or callousness of organised crime groups. Rather, the smuggled pay substantially more than Western tourists to cross international borders because governments have made them hazardous to cross. Many can only afford the trip by taking on debt, which then pushes them to accept work from whomever is willing to give it to them. In this way, border control policies and employment laws compound the problem of modern slavery more often than they redress it.

The unpalatable truth is that modern slavery discourse has so thoroughly blinded us that we now need to speak to those cast as ‘evil perpetrators’ to appreciate how UK policies enable severe exploitation by pushing vulnerable people to become dependent on people who are thoroughly unsuited to caring for them. As it stands, the Borders and Nationality Bill will do little to rectify this major oversight. It will compound the plights of vulnerable people, some whom will feel they have little choice but to exploit others in order to survive their extremely precarious predicaments.

This article draws on research laid out in greater detail in our forthcoming book, Demystifying Modern Slavery, which is due out with Routledge later this year. All names used in this piece are pseudonyms.
Violence against women garment workers increased during pandemic


Women workers experienced more verbal, physical and sexual violence under COVID-19, reveals report into garment factories in six Asian countries



Tansy Hoskins
18 February 2022

Illustration: Inge Snip. All rights reserved

“Any mother who sends their daughter to a factory will be scared for her safety. I have worked in this industry for more than 20 years and I have seen terrible things happen: rapes, suicides and even murders,” said Chellamma*, a 46-year-old garment worker in the city of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu.

Tiruppur, which is known as the knitwear capital of India, bustles with garment factories, but when her two daughters started looking for work, Chellamma insisted it was in the same factory as her, so that she could at least try to keep them safe.

“Women workers have no power to oppose the men in power – be it supervisors or managers. They can do anything to any woman, we are all at their mercy and we have no one to support or stand for us,” she said.

Women at the factory where Chellamma and her daughters work were interviewed as part of a new in-depth survey that documents an alarming rise in Gender Based Violence and Harassment (GBVH) against garment workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examined six countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

A Stitch in Time Saves None’, by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), says that while the global garment industry has promised to reduce poverty and uplift the status of women, in reality it has delivered rock-bottom wages, extreme hours and unsafe, often violent conditions. As a result, the AFWA now terms the harm inflicted on garment workers as the “Garment Industrial Trauma Complex”.

The report, which makes for extremely disturbing reading, directly links the rise in GVBH during the pandemic to the purchasing practices of international fashion brands including American Eagle, Bestseller, C&A, Inditex, Kohl’s, Levi’s, Marks & Spencer, Next, Nike, Target, Vans/VF Corporation and Walmart.

“GBVH, in the form of economic harm, has become an essential condition in supply chains through which lead firms transfer the costs of market crises to women workers in order to accumulate vast profits or control losses,” according to the report. Workers are paid poverty-level wages, which means they can’t survive even a few days without work and quickly fall into hunger, debt and intergenerational poverty.

"We have documented violence from men including supervisors, landlords, dormitory owners, shop keepers etc – men in positions of power who used the pandemic to further exploit and abuse women,” explained Ashley Saxby, South-East Asia coordinator at AFWA.

“This is linked to a range of gendered power dynamics, but it can’t be separated from the purchasing practices of brands and their actions during the pandemic that reinforced women’s vulnerability."
Verbal, physical and sexual violence

When the owners of Chellamma’s factory resumed production after the first lockdown in 2020, workers experienced extra overtime (unpaid), high targets and an increase in GBVH.

Another worker at the factory, Soumya, described verbal harassment as part of the job. “As production targets increase, harassment also increases. Every day is stressful,” she said. “Some supervisors call you ‘bitch’, ‘moron’, ‘idiot’ and so on, when a worker does not finish targets. Complaints against all this won’t take you anywhere. No one cares about our complaints. Only finishing production targets matter.”

AFWA's report into garment factories in Asia | AFWA

At a factory in Gurgaon in northern India, workers reported being pushed, touched inappropriately, having items of clothing thrown at them, and supervisors repeatedly raising their hands as if to slap them. An elderly woman from the factory said: “What respect will you have for men who abuse women of their mother’s age?”

As well as verbal and physical abuse, workers reported sexual violence. “The supervisor harassed me in various ways, even trying to touch my body, slapping me on my backside,” said Sakhina, a worker in the busy garment city of Gazipur in Bangladesh. “One day he hugged me when he found me alone in front of the toilet. After that, I was afraid to go to the toilet.”

I kept silent for fear of losing my job


Increased job insecurity during the pandemic led to an increased fear of retaliation if violence was reported. This created an even greater culture of impunity among male supervisors. “Despite these problems,” Sakhina said, “I kept silent for fear of losing my job.”

At other factories there were reports of women workers being coerced into sex by factory mechanics who otherwise refused to fix broken sewing machine, which meant that workers lost vital wages.
Impact on home life

The impact of brands’ purchasing practises did not remain within factory walls, but ricocheted out into workers’ homes and communities. The report outlines how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, workers faced “not only the retreat of the state but also the disengagement of global apparel brands and the absence of employer-based social protection”.

According to the report, factory life is inseparable from home life, where women garment workers do the majority of the housework and care provision: “The fashion industry, despite being a modern capitalist industry, relies on and strengthens pre-capitalist patriarchal relations in supplier countries as a central means to amass wealth.”

For many people around the world, the pandemic deepened the significance of the home, but for many garment workers, ‘home’ was reinforced as a site of violence.

Sonali is a 40-year-old garment worker from Bengaluru (Bangalore) in India. Her lockdown experience was one of closed factories, nothing to eat except rice and water, and not enough money to buy medicine for her daughter. But there is another part of her story.

“Although I am separated from my husband, I had to live with him during the lockdown period because I did not have any savings,” she said. “My husband tried to sexually abuse me many times. He would not take a ‘no’ as an answer. It was torture. I have never felt so helpless in my life. Many women had to endure this [marital rape] silently during the lockdown.”

Sonali’s experience is inseparable from her treatment as a worker for global fashion brands. Her pay is so low that she is unable to amass any savings for periods of crisis, such as the pandemic.

“The shame associated with speaking about her experience, and living in a highly patriarchal society, prevented Sonali from speaking out,” said Nandita Shivakumar, AFWA’s campaigns and communications coordinator.

“When we do these interviews, we also offer GBVH training and a safe space where many women speak about their personal lives – that is why women like Sonali open up about these issues. Many feel that if they had higher wages, they could leave abusive marriages,” Shivakumar explained.

Anju is another worker in Gazipur, Bangladesh. Her story represents the widespread increase in gender-based violence by landlords and dormitory owners within the fashion industry. “When the pandemic came, my work became irregular and I couldn’t pay my rent on time,” she said.

“After two months, my landlord approached me and said, spend two nights with me and I will not charge you for the rent. Make me happy and I will help you. With that, I thought my only [way] out was suicide.” When she refused him, the landlord stole her jewellery and kicked Anju out of her home. Other garment workers report similar stories of harassment and violence from shopkeepers, to whom they have fallen into debt.
Pay a living wage

“The lack of living wages escalated the massive humanitarian crisis brought about by the pandemic,” according to ‘A Stitch in Time’, so it is not surprising that a living wage is the first thing AFWA is calling for.

“Preventing and remediating gender-based violence in homes and factories requires brands to provide living wages for workers and ending all barriers to freedom of association and collective bargaining – especially in women-dominated sectors from the garment industry,” said Saxby.

AFWA also wants to see its ‘Safe Circle Approach’ established across factories. This includes pouring time and resources into building women workers’ leadership on production lines; ending misogynistic power relations between owners and workers; and long-term monitoring and oversight. AFWA says that brands must stop exploiting governance weaknesses and patriarchal social norms in production countries in their quest for profit.

“Vague, superficial and noncommittal promises of brands to eradicate gender-based violence need to be replaced with enforceable, binding commitments to work with women-led trade unions, to develop agreements and programmes to monitor, remediate and prevent GBVH,” Saxby concludes.

* The names of all garment workers have been changed.