Sports Card Blogs

DSEI: A supermarket for state surveillance and border wars

Picture by Sara Woods, all rights reserved to the author. It took Stephen*
two years to get to the UK. The
journey began in his home
country of Sudan, crossing
through Libya, Italy, France and Belgium before reaching the UK where
he is applying to stay. Like thousands of others, he spent several
months in France and Belgium
before eventually crossing
the UK border, earlier this year, in
the back of a van.

Stephen had been
through several months of
failed attempts before this:
Being
discovered in Calais after
several hours cramped in the
back of a van from Belgium
with a group of four or five others,
then being stuck in France,
getting the money together to travel back to Belgium
and try again.

“If you have a good luck you can pass; if you
don’t, the security check will take you out,” he explains. “First
they use dogs, and if the dogs indicate there’s something, they
will check it for themselves…
If they can’t find anything easily they have to take the truck to
the computer scanner…
It’s quite scary.”

He says police patrols in Calais and elsewhere
operate day and night, with officers carrying tasers and pepper
spray. “They are using it easy – they don't care what is going to
happen, it doesn't matter for them,” he says. “They don’t care
if you die, if you don’t, if you’re injured…”

Borders are becoming increasingly militarised and
unsafe places –
particularly for people like
Stephen, who are trying to cross them undocumented. The security
measures he describes are only the visible ones. As well as the X-ray
machine, there’s a monitor that can detect heartbeats, and another
to detect raised levels of carbon dioxide from people breathing
inside the lorries.

Migrants and smugglers go to great lengths to
avoid detection by such machines –
such as travelling in airtight lorry containers and risking death by
asphyxiation, as happened to 15
year old Masud from Afghanistan in early 2016; 71
men, women and children in 2015, and 58
people from China in 2000.

The entire UK border zone at Calais is surrounded
by floodlights, 2.5 miles of nine-feet high fencing, a "comprehensive
network of surveillance cameras", and drones.
As well as the tasers and pepper spray described by Stephen, border
guards at Calais are now equipped with guns, batons and body armour.

Private
companies, producing and developing the
technology used at borders are making money from the perceived
threat
of an 'invasion' of refugees in Europe and the very real suffering of
people. Many of the companies developing and promoting equipment,
surveillance technologies and the IT infrastructure to track people
on the move are often among the world’s biggest arms companies.

These defence giants not only profit from the wars
and state oppression that cause people to flee their homes, but also
from the high-tech surveillance equipment that tracks them, the
violence that greets them, and the biometric systems that register
them on arrival.

The biannual Defence and Security Equipment
International (DSEI) trade fair is a chance for these companies to
showcase their work and products. From 12-15 September 2017, DSEI
will host over 1,600 companies, from across the defence and security
sector industries, at the ExCeL centre in London Docklands. It’s
set to attract over 34,000 visitors, including Defence Ministers,
international military representatives and private sector companies.
Many of the companies who profit from borders will be represented –
part of a border security market estimated
at €15 billion in 2015 and predicted to rise to €29 billion by
2022.

All across Europe there has been an increasingly
militarised response to migration by the European Union. Border
Wars, a 2016 report from the Transnational
Institute (TNI) and Stop Wapenhandel puts the total EU funding for
member state border security measures at €4.5 billion between 2004
and 2020.

Technologies used against migrants include
monitoring towers, cameras, land radars and wireless
telecommunication, infra-red surveillance, high-tech fences,
identification systems, immigration databases, drones,
even
warships.

The
European border security industry is dominated by major arms
companies, including DSEI exhibitors Thales,
Safran and BAE
Systems – the
third largest arms company in the world – who in 2002 won a
£7.6
million contract from Romania to supply
equipment used in tightening the border, including Mobile
Surveillance Vehicles (MSVs), hand-held thermal imagers and night
vision binoculars.

Increased surveillance technology at borders is
forcing undocumented migrants everywhere to take greater and greater
risks. This year over
2,400 people have already lost their lives in
the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. Over 5,000
people died in 2016.

The numbers are growing, but the routes and causes
of death have changed. Starting from the summer of 2015 – the “long
summer of migration” – huge numbers of people crossed the Aegean
Sea from Turkey to Greece, taking the Balkan Route through Macedonia,
Serbia, Croatia or Hungary, then into Austria and Germany, or on to
Nordic countries such as Sweden, where Syrian citizens were at one
time almost guaranteed refugee status.

During the first few weeks of January 2016, more
than 30,000 people successfully crossed the
Aegean to Greece, in comparison to nearly 1,500 in the whole of
January 2015.

But one by one, countries along the Balkan Route
began to shut their borders, even building
physical walls in some cases, and criminalising
migration in increasingly creative ways. After Turkey was given
€3 billion to keep migrants away from EU
borders, European border army FRONTEX were
deployed to some of the Greek islands, and NATO
warships began patrolling the Eastern Med, this
stopped being the busiest route into Europe, and people began making
their way to Libya instead.

Libya is now an incredibly dangerous place as
rival militias compete for power. Black Africans are commonly
captured
and put into makeshift camps by these gangs,
often in starving, torturous, and extremely poor conditions. The
gangs know that the European Union likes to export
its border management
to external “third countries”, where monitoring of
human rights conditions are harder, and trafficking people is
increasingly lucrative. The European Union has been training the
Libyan Coastguard and supplied it with €200 million, but rather
than rescuing people, they are carrying out illegal
push-backs and armed violence against migrants. Now ISIS is also
active in Libya, the situation is even worse.

In 2017, nearly all deaths of migrants in the
Mediterranean have been people using the Central Mediterranean route,
trying to cross between Libya and Italy. NATO
has now also deployed warships there as part of 'Operation Sea
Guardian'.

The British government has thrown millions
at the Calais border, which seems on
its way to full privatisation. The death toll
is rising along with the amount of money thrown at the border, with a
growing
number of deaths each year. An October
2016 report from the Calais Research Network
documented 40 companies benefiting from this situation, many of whom
will be exhibiting at DSEI:

• Thales –
  Described as, “one of the top-earning companies in the border
  industry”, the French multinational was commissioned
  to supply a surveillance and access control
  system at Calais in 2010. In 2014 they were awarded a two year £3.8
  million contract from the UK Home Office to
  provide a system to encrypt biometric and biographic data for
  Biometric Residence Permit (BRP) cards for non-EU foreigners.

• The Chemring
  Group –
  supplied PMMWI (Passive Millimeter-Wave Imaging) and vehicle
  scanning. Roke Manor Research, part of Chemring Group, developed the
  PandoraTM lorry
  scanning system, trialled in Calais.

• FLIR Systems –
  has supplied thermal
  imaging cameras for use in Calais during the
  night or in fog, rain or snow when CCTV cameras can’t provide a
  clear image.

• L3
  Technologies
  –
  supplied x-ray scanning equipment at Calais.

Opposing
DSEI is one way to act in solidarity with migrants. During the ‘Free
Movement for People, Not Weapons’ day of action against DSEI 2015,
a member of Black
Dissidents
said as part of a rousing
speech:

"If
countries are embroiled in a western-fuelled armed conflict, people
will flee. They will flee to safer places. European governments have
ensured that if they arrive here, they will not be safe. They will
suffer the risk of deportations, detention centres, or raids. They
will be scrutinised on the basis of their stories, or their age.
While the privileged sell their weapons, and move freely, trans
people are detained, queer people have to prove their sexuality,
deaths in detention occur in parallel to deaths in custody, and
privatisation of services by global security firms such as G4S, or
Serco are left unaccountable with impunity."

Join
the week of action to Stop the Arms Fair
at London’s Docklands from 4-11 September, 2017. The Stop
the Arms Fair coalition is made up of
diverse groups and individuals who oppose the fair. The coalition
supports groups using a diversity
of different tatics to oppose the fair.
It is open for new people and new movements to get involved.

Thursday 7 September's day of action has the
theme 'Solidarity
Without Borders' making the links
between the arms and security industry. There are also events going
on across
the UK, in the lead up to DSEI and
during the event.

*name
changed to protect his identity