GUY LAMB Should SA be exporting killer drones?

FOR a number of years, SA’s defence industry, particularly Denel Dynamics, has been producing and exporting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones. A UAV does not transport a person, but is operated either by a pilot by remote control from another location or follows a preprogrammed flight path.

Until last year, South African defence companies produced and exported only unarmed UAVs. This has changed with Denel Dynamics’s development of the Seeker 400, which is equipped with air-toground missiles. This armed drone has received international media interest, as there have been unconfirmed reports that the government approved the export of an unknown number of Seeker 400s to Saudi Arabia after the US declined to sell a consignment of its Predator drones to the Saudi government.

UAVs have strategic advantages for governments as they can provide accurate and real-time reconnaissance information. They can be useful in disaster relief and search and rescue, and they have even been deployed in the Kruger National Park to assist with antipoaching operations. However, in the hands of undemocratic governments with poor human rights records, drones are likely to be put to nefarious uses.

UAVs can be deployed rapidly and can be used to destroy enemy installations and inflict casualties on enemy forces at a fraction of the cost of conventional military operations. The US government is the most prolific user of armed UAVs, mainly in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. The principle function of these drones, however, appears to have been counterterrorism, where “high-value” individuals identified as al-Qaeda terrorists are placed on a “kill list” and are subjected to “targeted killing”.

The use of armed drones has sparked heated debate in the US media. The furore has revolved largely around the rights of US citizens — with alleged links to alQaeda — who have been killed in drone attacks in foreign countries. Other commentators have expressed concern about the violation of the territorial sovereignty of the country where the drone attacks take place.

Intriguingly, analysts with a hawkish disposition have questioned the effectiveness of armed drones in combating terrorism. For example, an article last month in academic journal Small Wars and Insurgencies suggested that the extensive use of drones by the US government to respond to international terrorism had resulted in “intellectual laziness” as it negated the opportunity to collect intelligence from the “high-value targets as detainees … (and) reduces the problem of terrorism to a series of kill lists, instead of a sociopolitical phenomenon with dynamics that need to be grasped if they are to be overcome”. On the other end of the spectrum, some liberal scholars have argued that drones can themselves be defined as instruments of terrorism.

A moral line is crossed when a government chooses to use armed drones as part of its defence and security strategy, as such technology entails a decision to engage in a new way of killing people. Such killing is by remote control, where the drone operator is executing the “kill order” in a type of detached reality. In constitutional democracies, this can be augmented through checks, balances and judicial procedures. However, in the case of authoritarian regimes, such measures are unlikely to be adopted, and armed drones may even be deployed against domestic targets.

For several years, SA’s National Conventional Arms Control Committee has approved the export of unarmed UAVs to various governments in the Middle East and North Africa, many of which have questionable democratic credentials and shoddy records human rights records. According to Denel Dynamics, the Middle East has been its most lucrative market for UAVs and will continue to be a priority market for the export of the Seeker 400, which will reportedly have a price tag of R210,000 a system.

Moral considerations extend beyond the dynamics of the Middle East. As South Africans, we should be asking ourselves if it is acceptable and justifiable for our government to approve the export of what are in effect remote-control assassination devices. After all, Denel (and its subsidiaries, including Denel Dynamics) is subsidised by the government (and therefore by taxpayers’ money). Surely robust public debate on South African drones and their export is urgently needed?

Lamb is director of the Safety and Violence Initiative at the University of Cape Town.