Sitiveni Qiliho, Fiji’s police commissioner, says he doesn’t watch films any more because, since taking on Fiji police’s top job two years ago, his life has enough drama.

Over the past few months he has found himself scuba diving in search of multimillion-dollar stashes of cocaine stored in huge underwater nets, arresting drug traffickers on the high seas and informing remote islands communities that the mysterious packages washing up on their beaches are full of cocaine and shouldn’t be baked into cakes or put in tea.

“It’s what movie scripts are made of ... all the Hollywood blockbuster movies about drugs are centred around this script,” he says. “I don’t watch movies, I deal with it in real life.”

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Qiliho spent more than 25 years in Fiji’s army, serving abroad in various UN missions, before leaving in 2015 as a brigadier. Since becoming police commissioner in November 2015, Qiliho has found himself involved in a different sort of battle, as Fiji has become a stop-off for drug traffickers moving their illicit cargo through the Pacific.

“The fight against drugs is something that keeps me going,” he says.

Fiji, one of the most populous and developed nations in the Pacific, is made up of more than 330 islands spanning 194,000 sq km (75,000 sq mi). Qiliho estimates his officers spend at least a quarter of their time trying to stamp out drug trafficking and production as part of Operation Vavuraka, which means uprooting.

One aspect of the operation is the literal uprooting of marijuana plants. Because the country is so fertile, police have had cases of marijuana plants sprouting inside and around police stations, after marijuana plants brought in to be used as evidence have dropped seeds.

But Fiji has also started having to deal not just with “green drugs”, as Qiliho calls them, but also “white drugs” – cocaine and methamphetamine. Some arrive with tourists, others come through gangs exploiting the country’s location at the heart of a drug trafficking route that starts in the US and Latin America and ends in Australia and New Zealand.

Fishermen ‘are not after fish any more’

Onboard the Veiqaravi patrol boat as it plies the waters off the west coast of Fiji’s main island, Qiliho is explaining how 120 bricks of cocaine, each worth thousands of dollars, washed up on remote Fijian islands in 2018.

Traffickers had filled a large net – “about the size of this cabin”, says Qiliho, “about four metres squared” – with hundreds of 1kg packages of cocaine wrapped in plastic. The net was submerged in the ocean attached to a transponder.

“In this particular case … [the anchored rope] snapped because of the weather conditions and the net floated up and tore on the reef,” Qiliho explains.

Qiliho scrambled to get officers out to the islands to secure the drugs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A crew member of the police boat Veiqaravi in Fiji. Photograph: Rob Rickman/The Guardian

The nightmare scenario for police in these cases, says Superintendent Brett Kidner, who served as senior liaison officer for the Australian federal police in the Pacific region based in Suva at the time, is that people will consume the drug, not knowing what it is. In one case in the Federated States of Micronesia, cocaine discovered in a lagoon was used as washing powder, until locals realised it wasn’t lathering. In Tahiti in 2017 a boat full of cocaine exploded on a remote reef. Weeks later police discovered an island almost totally addicted to cocaine.

“Our biggest concern was that people may think these packages contain sugar, powdered toothpaste or they may think it was baking powder or something along those lines and as a result subject their families to a harm that they shouldn’t have been subjected to,” Kidner says.

For Qiliho, the fear has shifted from people unknowingly ingesting the drugs to them keeping the drugs to sell.

“We picked up information that some fishermen going out diving were not after fish any more,” says Qiliho. “They were after these packages because of the money that is being offered, a few thousand dollars. It was quick, easy money.”

Another such net was discovered in Fiji’s waters in March by a man out for a boat trip with his father. The man removed the transponder to hand in to police, and tried to describe the location of the net to police but, despite Qiliho and his men scuba diving for several days, they never found the drugs.

Qiliho says the battle is a “David and Goliath” one.

For a start, there is a question of resources. The Veiqaravi, a gift from the AFP, is an incredibly useful resource, but it is also Fiji police’s only large patrol boat.

The lack of resources means locals have alerted police to suspicious boats in their waters but, by the time officers arrive, the vessels have vanished.

“It’s no use the information coming 48 hours late and things have gone,” he says, citing one bust where Fijian and New Zealand police recovered about 30 blocks of cocaine from a storage facility they estimate could have held 800. “So where’s the rest?” he asks. “Probably on its way to Australia and New Zealand.”

Qiliho says Pacific authorities consistently find themselves two steps behind the traffickers. “[They’re] very creative,” he says. “What will be the next mode of transportation? Moved by air before, now by sea, what’s coming next?

“It’s something we can’t afford to take our foot off the pedal. We’ve got to maintain that momentum and keep fighting, only then will we succeed.

“We’ve seen the effects of drug usage in other countries, we don’t want that.”

Qiliho says he urges his officers to think about the sort of society they want for their children and grandchildren.

“I wouldn’t want to retire and be an old man in the village and have one of my mates come up to me when we’re sitting around having kava and say, ‘Man, you were the commissioner of police and you did nothing about it, and see where Fiji is now.’”