The Dark side of Dubai - Must Read
serves them right
This was bound to happen with Dubai turning into an immoral artificial haven for the corrupt form the west and within the Arab world itself.
This could possibly be a 'sign' for Dubai to change its way and return to the morality of Islam that it too freely was willing to trade in for Western Capitalist usurious values which have no place in an Islamic nation.This is what happens when the Arab world 'invests' its wealth on the avaricious and exploitative West who mark my words will not come and 'bail' Dubai out of its financial hell hole which it allowed them and themselves to dig such a deep hole.
there is nothing wrong at all with progress and modernity but not at the expense of losing your religious and moral identity and national values which sadly the Emirates too willingly have done. I wonder what they will do when their "Nation's' Oil funds run out?? Are they hoping and expecting their Western Bosom pals, whom they helped out many times financially, to come to their assistance- I don't think so and in fact these Western "pals will probably be so happy to see yet another Arab and Muslim country go down the sewer.Just how many millions did the Emirates and Saudia Arabia for that matter SQUANDER on their COLONIAL WESTERN Zionist Masters who steal form the poor and incessantly feed the Far bellied Wealthy whose insatiable greed for economic, financial and political power is like a bottomless pit to Hell itself!!
What these shameful Emirate Arab leaders should have done was to invest their vast wealth into their own nation for their People, and share their God given wealth to their brethren within the Muslim Ummah/World, instead of squandering it on a PLASTIC Hollywood 'Dynasty 'style production,a pathetic Disneyland for the Western rich and famous with phoney millionaires, phoney businesses that exploited the workers and treated them like dirt, instead of in the true Spirit of Islam;and you had all those greedy Western Migrant workers who used to flood in to Dubai, got their special "Perks', made their thousands, tax free of course whilst at the same time hating the ASrabs and Muslims deep down- but naturally their "Money' was good enough for their deep White pockets which gave them healthy bank balances.
They could have invested wisely and should have set up their own Currency,their own Islamic Dinar, backed by Gold, which could and should have been used by ALL the Muslim Nations. But what did they do, they went along with their Western Zionist Buddies and their fake Dollar and Euros which are worth absolutely Nothing- just pieces of worthless paper circulated by the likes of the Banking Mafia under the House of Rothschild, Rockefellers, Goldman Sachs etc-- all a bunch of lying, deceiving, corrupt Financial 'Corporatocracy' whose nations are led by infamous people who have tragically for us all, ushered in a new era of 'kakitocracy' and 'kleptomaniacracy'
Is THIS what Dubai and the Emirates really wished for their country?? Is this really their 'pride' or is it more a case of sheer arrogance and greed. Well looks like Dubai has earned itself a 'pride befall a fall'-
I will not cry for Dubai or any of these other corrupt Arab Nations who will follow Dubai- they deserve their misfortune. My sympathies lie with the innocent people they used, exploited and abused whilst they enjoyed their short lived wealth and nepotism, while being SHACKLED to the old age Judaic USURERS who bring nothing but corruption, disaster, immorality and misfortune to all those who work hard with their hearts and souls in order to earn an honest living in order to support themselves and their families.
I will cry for those these greedy installed Leaders turned their backs on, sitting on their phoney manmade thrones whilst others around them lived in poverty, destitution and lost their lives fighting for their Faith, for their oppressed people, defending their Nation to the death, instead of wallowing in obscene riches.
I will cry for those who refused to sell their souls to their devil for a cheap price and who maintained their dignity, their honour and their love for their Faith, counting the little blessings they got from their Creator, instead of these Zionist Mafia who have bled and cotinue to bleed so many dry,. destroying everything that was decent and honourable!
Dubai- you have Earned the position you are in.You have earned what your LEFT HAND has dealt itself.
The dark side of Dubai
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 64368.html
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to
Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the
city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.
The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed - the absolute ruler of Dubai
- beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other
building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald
McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the
city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle
East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He
dominates the Manhattan-manqu skyline, beaming out from row after row of
glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins.
And there he stands on the tallest building in the world - a skinny
spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in
history.
But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous
cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless
buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new
constructions - like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built
in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island - where rainwater
is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This
Neverland was built on the Never-Never - and now the cracks are beginning
to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in
the desert.
Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed,
the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from
nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and
slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised
world that may be crashing - at last - into history.
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I. An Adult Disneyland
Karen Andrews can't speak. Every time she starts to tell her story, she
puts her head down and crumples. She is slim and angular and has the faded
radiance of the once-rich, even though her clothes are as creased as her
forehead. I find her in the car park of one of Dubai's finest international
hotels, where she is living, in her Range Rover. She has been sleeping here
for months, thanks to the kindness of the Bangladeshi car park attendants
who don't have the heart to move her on. This is not where she thought her
Dubai dream would end.
Her story comes out in stutters, over four hours. At times, her old voice
- witty and warm - breaks through. Karen came here from Canada when her
husband was offered a job in the senior division of a famous multinational.
"When he said Dubai, I said - if you want me to wear black and quit
booze, baby, you've got the wrong girl. But he asked me to give it a
chance. And I loved him."
All her worries melted when she touched down in Dubai in 2005. "It was an
adult Disneyland, where Sheikh Mohammed is the mouse," she says. "Life was
fantastic. You had these amazing big apartments, you had a whole army of
your own staff, you pay no taxes at all. It seemed like everyone was a CEO.
We were partying the whole time."
Her husband, Daniel, bought two properties. "We were drunk on Dubai," she
says. But for the first time in his life, he was beginning to mismanage
their finances. "We're not talking huge sums, but he was getting confused.
It was so unlike Daniel, I was surprised. We got into a little bit of
debt." After a year, she found out why: Daniel was diagnosed with a brain
tumour.
One doctor told him he had a year to live; another said it was benign and
he'd be okay. But the debts were growing. "Before I came here, I didn't
know anything about Dubai law. I assumed if all these big companies come
here, it must be pretty like Canada's or any other liberal democracy's,"
she says. Nobody told her there is no concept of bankruptcy. If you get
into debt and you can't pay, you go to prison.
"When we realised that, I sat Daniel down and told him: listen, we need to
get out of here. He knew he was guaranteed a pay-off when he resigned, so
we said - right, let's take the pay-off, clear the debt, and go." So
Daniel resigned - but he was given a lower pay-off than his contract
suggested. The debt remained. As soon as you quit your job in Dubai, your
employer has to inform your bank. If you have any outstanding debts that
aren't covered by your savings, then all your accounts are frozen, and you
are forbidden to leave the country.
"Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of
our apartment." Karen can't speak about what happened next for a long time;
she is shaking.
Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six
days before she could talk to him. "He told me he was put in a cell with
another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn't face
the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed
razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in
front of him."
Karen managed to beg from her friends for a few weeks, "but it was so
humiliating. I've never lived like this. I worked in the fashion industry.
I had my own shops. I've never..." She peters out.
Daniel was sentenced to six months' imprisonment at a trial he couldn't
understand. It was in Arabic, and there was no translation. "Now I'm here
illegally, too," Karen says I've got no money, nothing. I have to last nine
months until he's out, somehow." Looking away, almost paralysed with
embarrassment, she asks if I could buy her a meal.
She is not alone. All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping
secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars.
"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is - nothing is what it
seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job.
They lure you in telling you it's one thing - a modern kind of place -
but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship."
II. Tumbleweed
Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert, inhabited
only by cactuses and tumbleweed and scorpions. But downtown there are
traces of the town that once was, buried amidst the metal and glass. In the
dusty fort of the Dubai Museum, a sanitised version of this story is told.
In the mid-18th century, a small village was built here, in the lower
Persian Gulf, where people would dive for pearls off the coast. It soon
began to accumulate a cosmopolitan population washing up from Persia, the
Indian subcontinent, and other Arab countries, all hoping to make their
fortune. They named it after a local locust, the daba, who consumed
everything before it. The town was soon seized by the gunships of the
British Empire, who held it by the throat as late as 1971. As they scuttled
away, Dubai decided to ally with the six surrounding states and make up the
United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The British quit, exhausted, just as oil was being discovered, and the
sheikhs who suddenly found themselves in charge faced a remarkable dilemma.
They were largely illiterate nomads who spent their lives driving camels
through the desert - yet now they had a vast pot of gold. What should
they do with it?
Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi - so
Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the revenues to build something that would
last. Israel used to boast it made the desert bloom; Sheikh Maktoum
resolved to make the desert boom. He would build a city to be a centre of
tourism and financial services, sucking up cash and talent from across the
globe. He invited the world to come tax-free - and they came in their
millions, swamping the local population, who now make up just 5 per cent of
Dubai. A city seemed to fall from the sky in just three decades, whole and
complete and swelling. They fast-forwarded from the 18th century to the
21st in a single generation.
If you take the Big Bus Tour of Dubai - the passport to a pre-processed
experience of every major city on earth - you are fed the
propaganda-vision of how this happened. "Dubai's motto is 'Open doors, open
minds'," the tour guide tells you in clipped tones, before depositing you
at the souks to buy camel tea-cosies. "Here you are free. To purchase
fabrics," he adds. As you pass each new monumental building, he tells you:
"The World Trade Centre was built by His Highness..."
But this is a lie. The sheikh did not build this city. It was built by
slaves. They are building it now.
III. Hidden in plain view
There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are
the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed;
and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are
trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in
dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain
gang - but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh
built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?
Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are
bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town,
where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled
back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was
unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like
greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung
out.
Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical
concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose
name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at - riven
with the smell of sewage and sweat - the men huddle around, eager to tell
someone, anyone, what is happening to them.
Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get
you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it
is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's
village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there
was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (400) just for
working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they
would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they
had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (2,300) for the work
visa - a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal
sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to
this paradise.
As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by
his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely
that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat -
where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five
minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees - for 500 dirhams a month
(90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like
it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my
passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd
better get to work," they replied.
Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home - his son, daughter, wife
and parents - were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally
made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to
pay for the cost of getting here - and all to earn less than he did in
Bangladesh.
He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker
bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled
onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The
room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp - holes in
the ground - are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies.
There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You
cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of
summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can
pray for a moment of breeze.
The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly
desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else
to drink," he says.
The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg
bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat -
it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or
weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink.
You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an
hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could
die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped
here even longer."
He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he
builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In
his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as
he constructs it floor-by-floor.
Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger.
You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year,
some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four
months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and
water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.
The "ringleaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal
regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about
that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the
sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by
adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in
Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."
Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in
dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their
companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have
been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the
loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't,
we'll be sent to prison."
This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time,
never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat - but I met nobody
who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped
into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.
Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on
construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the
camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're
described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they
simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a
"cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and
suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals
in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to
stop counting.
At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as
they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits.
They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal
says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai
skyline he built stands, oblivious.
IV. Mauled by the mall
I find myself stumbling in a daze from the camps into the sprawling marble
malls that seem to stand on every street in Dubai. It is so hot there is no
point building pavements; people gather in these cathedrals of consumerism
to bask in the air conditioning. So within a ten minute taxi-ride, I have
left Sohinal and I am standing in the middle of Harvey Nichols, being shown
a 20,000 taffeta dress by a bored salesgirl. "As you can see, it is cut
on the bias..." she says, and I stop writing.
Time doesn't seem to pass in the malls. Days blur with the same electric
light, the same shined floors, the same brands I know from home. Here,
Dubai is reduced to its component sounds: do-buy. In the most expensive
malls I am almost alone, the shops empty and echoing. On the record,
everybody tells me business is going fine. Off the record, they look
panicky. There is a hat exhibition ahead of the Dubai races, selling
elaborate headgear for 1,000 a pop. "Last year, we were packed. Now
look," a hat designer tells me. She swoops her arm over a vacant space.
I approach a blonde 17-year-old Dutch girl wandering around in hotpants,
oblivious to the swarms of men gaping at her. "I love it here!" she says.
"The heat, the malls, the beach!" Does it ever bother you that it's a slave
society? She puts her head down, just as Sohinal did. "I try not to see,"
she says. Even at 17, she has learned not to look, and not to ask; that,
she senses, is a transgression too far.
Between the malls, there is nothing but the connecting tissue of asphalt.
Every road has at least four lanes; Dubai feels like a motorway punctuated
by shopping centres. You only walk anywhere if you are suicidal. The
residents of Dubai flit from mall to mall by car or taxis.
How does it feel if this is your country, filled with foreigners? Unlike
the expats and the slave class, I can't just approach the native Emiratis
to ask questions when I see them wandering around - the men in cool white
robes, the women in sweltering black. If you try, the women blank you, and
the men look affronted, and tell you brusquely that Dubai is "fine". So I
browse through the Emirati blog-scene and found some typical-sounding young
Emiratis. We meet - where else? - in the mall.
Ahmed al-Atar is a handsome 23-year-old with a neat, trimmed beard,
tailored white robes, and rectangular wire-glasses. He speaks perfect
American-English, and quickly shows that he knows London, Los Angeles and
Paris better than most westerners. Sitting back in his chair in an
identikit Starbucks, he announces: "This is the best place in the world to
be young! The government pays for your education up to PhD level. You get
given a free house when you get married. You get free healthcare, and if
it's not good enough here, they pay for you to go abroad. You don't even
have to pay for your phone calls. Almost everyone has a maid, a nanny, and
a driver. And we never pay any taxes. Don't you wish you were Emirati?"
I try to raise potential objections to this Panglossian summary, but he
leans forward and says: "Look - my grandfather woke up every day and he
would have to fight to get to the well first to get water. When the wells
ran dry, they had to have water delivered by camel. They were always hungry
and thirsty and desperate for jobs. He limped all his life, because he
there was no medical treatment available when he broke his leg. Now look at
us!"
For Emiratis, this is a Santa Claus state, handing out goodies while it
makes its money elsewhere: through renting out land to foreigners, soft
taxes on them like business and airport charges, and the remaining dribble
of oil. Most Emiratis, like Ahmed, work for the government, so they're
cushioned from the credit crunch. "I haven't felt any effect at all, and
nor have my friends," he says. "Your employment is secure. You will only be
fired if you do something incredibly bad." The laws are currently being
tightened, to make it even more impossible to sack an Emirati.
Sure, the flooding-in of expats can sometimes be "an eyesore", Ahmed says.
"But we see the expats as the price we had to pay for this development. How
else could we do it? Nobody wants to go back to the days of the desert, the
days before everyone came. We went from being like an African country to
having an average income per head of $120,000 a year. And we're supposed to
complain?"
He says the lack of political freedom is fine by him. "You'll find it very
hard to find an Emirati who doesn't support Sheikh Mohammed." Because
they're scared? "No, because we really all support him. He's a great
leader. Just look!" He smiles and says: "I'm sure my life is very much like
yours. We hang out, have a coffee, go to the movies. You'll be in a Pizza
Hut or Nando's in London, and at the same time I'll be in one in Dubai," he
says, ordering another latte.
But do all young Emiratis see it this way? Can it really be so sunny in the
political sands? In the sleek Emirates Tower Hotel, I meet Sultan
al-Qassemi. He's a 31-year-old Emirati columnist for the Dubai press and
private art collector, with a reputation for being a contrarian liberal,
advocating gradual reform. He is wearing Western clothes - blue jeans and
a Ralph Lauren shirt - and speaks incredibly fast, turning himself into a
manic whirr of arguments.
"People here are turning into lazy, overweight babies!" he exclaims. "The
nanny state has gone too far. We don't do anything for ourselves! Why don't
any of us work for the private sector? Why can't a mother and father look
after their own child?" And yet, when I try to bring up the system of
slavery that built Dubai, he looks angry. "People should give us credit,"
he insists. "We are the most tolerant people in the world. Dubai is the
only truly international city in the world. Everyone who comes here is
treated with respect."
I pause, and think of the vast camps in Sonapur, just a few miles away.
Does he even know they exist? He looks irritated. "You know, if there are
30 or 40 cases [of worker abuse] a year, that sounds like a lot but when
you think about how many people are here..." Thirty or 40? This abuse is
endemic to the system, I say. We're talking about hundreds of thousands.
Sultan is furious. He splutters: "You don't think Mexicans are treated
badly in New York City? And how long did it take Britain to treat people
well? I could come to London and write about the homeless people on Oxford
Street and make your city sound like a terrible place, too! The workers
here can leave any time they want! Any Indian can leave, any Asian can
leave!"
But they can't, I point out. Their passports are taken away, and their
wages are withheld. "Well, I feel bad if that happens, and anybody who does
that should be punished. But their embassies should help them." They try.
But why do you forbid the workers - with force - from going on strike
against lousy employers? "Thank God we don't allow that!" he exclaims.
"Strikes are in-convenient! They go on the street - we're not having
that. We won't be like France. Imagine a country where they the workers can
just stop whenever they want!" So what should the workers do when they are
cheated and lied to? "Quit. Leave the country."
I sigh. Sultan is seething now. "People in the West are always complaining
about us," he says. Suddenly, he adopts a mock-whiny voice and says, in
imitation of these disgusting critics: "Why don't you treat animals better?
Why don't you have better shampoo advertising? Why don't you treat
labourers better?" It's a revealing order: animals, shampoo, then workers.
He becomes more heated, shifting in his seat, jabbing his finger at me. "I
gave workers who worked for me safety goggles and special boots, and they
didn't want to wear them! It slows them down!"
And then he smiles, coming up with what he sees as his killer argument.
"When I see Western journalists criticise us - don't you realise you're
shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous
if Dubai fails. Our export isn't oil, it's hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans
or Iranians grow up saying - I want to go to Dubai. We're very important
to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don't
have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn't gloat at our demise. You
should be very worried.... Do you know what will happen if this model
fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path."
Sultan sits back. My arguments have clearly disturbed him; he says in a
softer, conciliatory tone, almost pleading: "Listen. My mother used to go
to the well and get a bucket of water every morning. On her wedding day,
she was given an orange as a gift because she had never eaten one. Two of
my brothers died when they were babies because the healthcare system hadn't
developed yet. Don't judge us." He says it again, his eyes filled with
intensity: "Don't judge us."
V. The Dunkin' Donuts Dissidents
But there is another face to the Emirati minority - a small huddle of
dissidents, trying to shake the Sheikhs out of abusive laws. Next to a
Virgin Megastore and a Dunkin' Donuts, with James Blunt's "You're
Beautiful" blaring behind me, I meet the Dubai dictatorship's Public Enemy
Number One. By way of introduction, Mohammed al-Mansoori says from within
his white robes and sinewy face: "Westerners come her and see the malls and
the tall buildings and they think that means we are free. But these
businesses, these buildings - who are they for? This is a dictatorship.
The royal family think they own the country, and the people are their
servants. There is no freedom here."
We snuffle out the only Arabic restaurant in this mall, and he says
everything you are banned - under threat of prison - from saying in
Dubai. Mohammed tells me he was born in Dubai to a fisherman father who
taught him one enduring lesson: Never follow the herd. Think for yourself.
In the sudden surge of development, Mohammed trained as a lawyer. By the
Noughties, he had climbed to the head of the Jurists' Association, an
organisation set up to press for Dubai's laws to be consistent with
international human rights legislation.
And then - suddenly - Mohammed thwacked into the limits of Sheikh
Mohammed's tolerance. Horrified by the "system of slavery" his country was
being built on, he spoke out to Human Rights Watch and the BBC. "So I was
hauled in by the secret police and told: shut up, or you will lose you job,
and your children will be unemployable," he says. "But how could I be
silent?"
He was stripped of his lawyer's licence and his passport - becoming yet
another person imprisoned in this country. "I have been blacklisted and so
have my children. The newspapers are not allowed to write about me."
Why is the state so keen to defend this system of slavery? He offers a
prosaic explanation. "Most companies are owned by the government, so they
oppose human rights laws because it will reduce their profit margins. It's
in their interests that the workers are slaves."
Last time there was a depression, there was a starbust of democracy in
Dubai, seized by force from the sheikhs. In the 1930s, the city's merchants
banded together against Sheikh Said bin Maktum al-Maktum - the absolute
ruler of his day - and insisted they be given control over the state
finances. It lasted only a few years, before the Sheikh - with the
enthusiastic support of the British - snuffed them out.
And today? Sheikh Mohammed turned Dubai into Creditopolis, a city built
entirely on debt. Dubai owes 107 percent of its entire GDP. It would be
bust already, if the neighbouring oil-soaked state of Abu Dhabi hadn't
pulled out its chequebook. Mohammed says this will constrict freedom even
further. "Now Abu Dhabi calls the tunes - and they are much more
conservative and restrictive than even Dubai. Freedom here will diminish
every day." Already, new media laws have been drafted forbidding the press
to report on anything that could "damage" Dubai or "its economy". Is this
why the newspapers are giving away glossy supplements talking about
"encouraging economic indicators"?
Everybody here waves Islamism as the threat somewhere over the horizon,
sure to swell if their advice is not followed. Today, every imam is
appointed by the government, and every sermon is tightly controlled to keep
it moderate. But Mohammed says anxiously: "We don't have Islamism here now,
but I think that if you control people and give them no way to express
anger, it could rise. People who are told to shut up all the time can just
explode."
Later that day, against another identikit-corporate backdrop, I meet
another dissident - Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, Professor of Political Science
at Emirates University. His anger focuses not on political reform, but the
erosion of Emirati identity. He is famous among the locals, a rare
outspoken conductor for their anger. He says somberly: "There has been a
rupture here. This is a totally different city to the one I was born in 50
years ago."
He looks around at the shiny floors and Western tourists and says: "What we
see now didn't occur in our wildest dreams. We never thought we could be
such a success, a trendsetter, a model for other Arab countries. The people
of Dubai are mighty proud of their city, and rightly so. And yet..." He
shakes his head. "In our hearts, we fear we have built a modern city but we
are losing it to all these expats."
Adbulkhaleq says every Emirati of his generation lives with a
"psychological trauma." Their hearts are divided - "between pride on one
side, and fear on the other." Just after he says this, a smiling waitress
approaches, and asks us what we would like to drink. He orders a Coke.
VI. Dubai Pride
There is one group in Dubai for whom the rhetoric of sudden freedom and
liberation rings true - but it is the very group the government wanted to
liberate least: gays.
Beneath a famous international hotel, I clamber down into possibly the only
gay club on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. I find a United Nations of
tank-tops and bulging biceps, dancing to Kylie, dropping ecstasy, and
partying like it's Soho. "Dubai is the best place in the Muslim world for
gays!" a 25-year old Emirati with spiked hair says, his arms wrapped around
his 31-year old "husband". "We are alive. We can meet. That is more than
most Arab gays."
It is illegal to be gay in Dubai, and punishable by 10 years in prison. But
the locations of the latest unofficial gay clubs circulate online, and men
flock there, seemingly unafraid of the police. "They might bust the club,
but they will just disperse us," one of them says. "The police have other
things to do."
In every large city, gay people find a way to find each other - but Dubai
has become the clearing-house for the region's homosexuals, a place where
they can live in relative safety. Saleh, a lean private in the Saudi
Arabian army, has come here for the Coldplay concert, and tells me Dubai is
"great" for gays: "In Saudi, it's hard to be straight when you're young.
The women are shut away so everyone has gay sex. But they only want to have
sex with boys - 15- to 21-year-olds. I'm 27, so I'm too old now. I need
to find real gays, so this is the best place. All Arab gays want to live in
Dubai."
With that, Saleh dances off across the dancefloor, towards a Dutch guy with
big biceps and a big smile.
VII. The Lifestyle
All the guidebooks call Dubai a "melting pot", but as I trawl across the
city, I find that every group here huddles together in its own little
ethnic enclave - and becomes a caricature of itself. One night - in the
heart of this homesick city, tired of the malls and the camps - I go to
Double Decker, a hang-out for British expats. At the entrance there is a
red telephone box, and London bus-stop signs. Its wooden interior looks
like a cross between a colonial clubhouse in the Raj and an Eighties school
disco, with blinking coloured lights and cheese blaring out. As I enter, a
girl in a short skirt collapses out of the door onto her back. A guy
wearing a pirate hat helps her to her feet, dropping his beer bottle with a
paralytic laugh.
I start to talk to two sun-dried women in their sixties who have been
getting gently sozzled since midday. "You stay here for The Lifestyle,"
they say, telling me to take a seat and order some more drinks. All the
expats talk about The Lifestyle, but when you ask what it is, they become
vague. Ann Wark tries to summarise it: "Here, you go out every night. You'd
never do that back home. You see people all the time. It's great. You have
lots of free time. You have maids and staff so you don't have to do all
that stuff. You party!"
They have been in Dubai for 20 years, and they are happy to explain how the
city works. "You've got a hierarchy, haven't you?" Ann says. "It's the
Emiratis at the top, then I'd say the British and other Westerners. Then I
suppose it's the Filipinos, because they've got a bit more brains than the
Indians. Then at the bottom you've got the Indians and all them lot."
They admit, however, they have "never" spoken to an Emirati. Never? "No.
They keep themselves to themselves." Yet Dubai has disappointed them. Jules
Taylor tells me: "If you have an accident here it's a nightmare. There was
a British woman we knew who ran over an Indian guy, and she was locked up
for four days! If you have a tiny bit of alcohol on your breath they're all
over you. These Indians throw themselves in front of cars, because then
their family has to be given blood money - you know, compensation. But
the police just blame us. That poor woman."
A 24-year-old British woman called Hannah Gamble takes a break from the
dancefloor to talk to me. "I love the sun and the beach! It's great out
here!" she says. Is there anything bad? "Oh yes!" she says. Ah: one of them
has noticed, I think with relief. "The banks! When you want to make a
transfer you have to fax them. You can't do it online." Anything else? She
thinks hard. "The traffic's not very good."
When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their
reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look
affronted. "It's the Arab way!" an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as
he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some
beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor,
gurning.
Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who
works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these
people. She says: "All the people who couldn't succeed in their own
countries end up here, and suddenly they're rich and promoted way above
their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I've never met so
many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world."
She adds: "It's absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me
doing the same job as a European girl, and she's paid a quarter of the
wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while
these incompetent managers pay themselves 40,000 a month."
With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their
joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back
Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly
Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too
expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable
accessory.
It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power
over her. You take her passport - everyone does; you decide when to pay
her, and when - if ever - she can take a break; and you decide who she
talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.
In a Burger King, a Filipino girl tells me it is "terrifying" for her to
wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak
away from the family they are with and beg her for help. "They say -
'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make
me work every waking hour seven days a week.' At first I would say - my
God, I will tell the consulate, where are you staying? But they never know
their address, and the consulate isn't interested. I avoid them now. I keep
thinking about a woman who told me she hadn't eaten any fruit in four
years. They think I have power because I can walk around on my own, but I'm
powerless."
The only hostel for women in Dubai - a filthy private villa on the brink
of being repossessed - is filled with escaped maids. Mela Matari, a
25-year-old Ethiopian woman with a drooping smile, tells me what happened
to her - and thousands like her. She was promised a paradise in the sands
by an agency, so she left her four year-old daughter at home and headed
here to earn money for a better future. "But they paid me half what they
promised. I was put with an Australian family - four children - and
Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was
exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to
work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me.
She beat me with her fists and kicked me. My ear still hurts. They wouldn't
give me my wages: they said they'd pay me at the end of the two years. What
could I do? I didn't know anybody here. I was terrified."
One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and
asked - in broken English - how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After
walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her
passport back from Madam. "Well, how could I?" she asks. She has been in
this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. "I lost
my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything," she says.
As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double
Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best
thing about Dubai was. "Oh, the servant class!" she trilled. "You do
nothing. They'll do anything!"
VIII. The End of The World
The World is empty. It has been abandoned, its continents unfinished.
Through binoculars, I think I can glimpse Britain; this sceptred isle
barren in the salt-breeze.
Here, off the coast of Dubai, developers have been rebuilding the world.
They have constructed artificial islands in the shape of all planet Earth's
land masses, and they plan to sell each continent off to be built on. There
were rumours that the Beckhams would bid for Britain. But the people who
work at the nearby coast say they haven't seen anybody there for months
now. "The World is over," a South African suggests.
All over Dubai, crazy projects that were Under Construction are now Under
Collapse. They were building an air-conditioned beach here, with cooling
pipes running below the sand, so the super-rich didn't singe their toes on
their way from towel to sea.
The projects completed just before the global economy crashed look empty
and tattered. The Atlantis Hotel was launched last winter in a $20m
fin-de-siecle party attended by Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan and Lily
Allen. Sitting on its own fake island - shaped, of course, like a palm
tree - it looks like an immense upturned tooth in a faintly decaying
mouth. It is pink and turreted - the architecture of the pharaohs, as
reimagined by Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Its Grand Lobby is a monumental dome covered
in glitterballs, held up by eight monumental concrete palm trees. Standing
in the middle, there is a giant shining glass structure that looks like the
intestines of every guest who has ever stayed at the Atlantis. It is
unexpectedly raining; water is leaking from the roof, and tiles are falling
off.
A South African PR girl shows me around its most coveted rooms, explaining
that this is "the greatest luxury offered in the world". We stroll past
shops selling 24m diamond rings around a hotel themed on the lost and
sunken continent of, yes, Atlantis. There are huge water tanks filled with
sharks, which poke around mock-abandoned castles and dumped submarines.
There are more than 1,500 rooms here, each with a sea view. The Neptune
suite has three floors, and - I gasp as I see it - it looks out
directly on to the vast shark tank. You lie on the bed, and the sharks
stare in at you. In Dubai, you can sleep with the fishes, and survive.
But even the luxury - reminiscent of a Bond villain's lair - is also
being abandoned. I check myself in for a few nights to the classiest hotel
in town, the Park Hyatt. It is the fashionistas' favourite hotel, where
Elle Macpherson and Tommy Hilfiger stay, a gorgeous, understated palace. It
feels empty. Whenever I eat, I am one of the only people in the restaurant.
A staff member tells me in a whisper: "It used to be full here. Now there's
hardly anyone." Rattling around, I feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining,
the last man in an abandoned, haunted home.
The most famous hotel in Dubai - the proud icon of the city - is the
Burj al Arab hotel, sitting on the shore, shaped like a giant glass sailing
boat. In the lobby, I start chatting to a couple from London who work in
the City. They have been coming to Dubai for 10 years now, and they say
they love it. "You never know what you'll find here," he says. "On our last
trip, at the beginning of the holiday, our window looked out on the sea. By
the end, they'd built an entire island there."
My patience frayed by all this excess, I find myself snapping: doesn't the
omnipresent slave class bother you? I hope they misunderstood me, because
the woman replied: "That's what we come for! It's great, you can't do
anything for yourself!" Her husband chimes in: "When you go to the toilet,
they open the door, they turn on the tap - the only thing they don't do
is take it out for you when you have a piss!" And they both fall about
laughing.
IX. Taking on the Desert
Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living
beyond its ecological means. You stand on a manicured Dubai lawn and watch
the sprinklers spray water all around you. You see tourists flocking to
swim with dolphins. You wander into a mountain-sized freezer where they
have built a ski slope with real snow. And a voice at the back of your head
squeaks: this is the desert. This is the most water-stressed place on the
planet. How can this be happening? How is it possible?
The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The
new Tiger Woods Gold Course needs four million gallons of water to be
pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and
disappear on the winds. The city is regularly washed over with dust-storms
that fog up the skies and turn the skyline into a blur. When the dust
parts, heat burns through. It cooks anything that is not kept constantly,
artificially wet.
Dr Mohammed Raouf, the environmental director of the Gulf Research Centre,
sounds sombre as he sits in his Dubai office and warns: "This is a desert
area, and we are trying to defy its environment. It is very unwise. If you
take on the desert, you will lose."
Sheikh Maktoum built his showcase city in a place with no useable water.
None. There is no surface water, very little acquifer, and among the lowest
rainfall in the world. So Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is
stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf - making it
the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce,
and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes.
It's the main reason why a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon
footprint of any human being - more than double that of an American.
If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out
of water. "At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so
much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues -
if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil..." he
shakes his head. "We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source
of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us
a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our
supplies falter. It would be hard to survive."
Global warming, he adds, makes the problem even worse. "We are building all
these artificial islands, but if the sea level rises, they will be gone,
and we will lose a lot. Developers keep saying it's all fine, they've taken
it into consideration, but I'm not so sure."
Is the Dubai government concerned about any of this? "There isn't much
interest in these problems," he says sadly. But just to stand still, the
average resident of Dubai needs three times more water than the average
human. In the looming century of water stresses and a transition away from
fossil fuels, Dubai is uniquely vulnerable.
I wanted to understand how the government of Dubai will react, so I decided
to look at how it has dealt with an environmental problem that already
exists - the pollution of its beaches. One woman - an American, working
at one of the big hotels - had written in a lot of online forums arguing
that it was bad and getting worse, so I called her to arrange a meeting. "I
can't talk to you," she said sternly. Not even if it's off the record? "I
can't talk to you." But I don't have to disclose your name... "You're not
listening. This phone is bugged. I can't talk to you," she snapped, and
hung up.
The next day I turned up at her office. "If you reveal my identity, I'll be
sent on the first plane out of this city," she said, before beginning to
nervously pace the shore with me. "It started like this. We began to get
complaints from people using the beach. The water looked and smelled odd,
and they were starting to get sick after going into it. So I wrote to the
ministers of health and tourism and expected to hear back immediately -
but there was nothing. Silence. I hand-delivered the letters. Still
nothing."
The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw
sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel
ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. "They told us
it was full of fecal matter and bacteria 'too numerous to count'. I had to
start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a
beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off." She began
to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums - and people began to
figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage
treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to
queue for three or four days at the treatment plants - so instead, they
were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage
down them, so it flowed straight to the sea.
Suddenly, it was an open secret - and the municipal authorities finally
acknowledged the problem. They said they would fine the truckers. But the
water quality didn't improve: it became black and stank. "It's got
chemicals in it. I don't know what they are. But this stuff is toxic."
She continued to complain - and started to receive anonymous phone calls.
"Stop embarassing Dubai, or your visa will be cancelled and you're out,"
they said. She says: "The expats are terrified to talk about anything. One
critical comment in the newspapers and they deport you. So what am I
supposed to do? Now the water is worse than ever. People are getting really
sick. Eye infections, ear infections, stomach infections, rashes. Look at
it!" There is faeces floating on the beach, in the shadow of one of Dubai's
most famous hotels.
"What I learnt about Dubai is that the authorities don't give a toss about
the environment," she says, standing in the stench. "They're pumping toxins
into the sea, their main tourist attraction, for God's sake. If there are
environmental problems in the future, I can tell you now how they will deal
with them - deny it's happening, cover it up, and carry on until it's a
total disaster." As she speaks, a dust-storm blows around us, as the desert
tries, slowly, insistently, to take back its land.
X. Fake Plastic Trees
On my final night in the Dubai Disneyland, I stop off on my way to the
airport, at a Pizza Hut that sits at the side of one of the city's endless,
wide, gaping roads. It is identical to the one near my apartment in London
in every respect, even the vomit-coloured decor. My mind is whirring and
distracted. Perhaps Dubai disturbed me so much, I am thinking, because
here, the entire global supply chain is condensed. Many of my goods are
made by semi-enslaved populations desperate for a chance 2,000 miles away;
is the only difference that here, they are merely two miles away, and you
sometimes get to glimpse their faces? Dubai is Market Fundamentalist
Globalisation in One City.
I ask the Filipino girl behind the counter if she likes it here. "It's OK,"
she says cautiously. Really? I say. I can't stand it. She sighs with relief
and says: "This is the most terrible place! I hate it! I was here for
months before I realised - everything in Dubai is fake. Everything you
see. The trees are fake, the workers' contracts are fake, the islands are
fake, the smiles are fake - even the water is fake!" But she is trapped,
she says. She got into debt to come here, and she is stuck for three years:
an old story now. "I think Dubai is like an oasis. It is an illusion, not
real. You think you have seen water in the distance, but you get close and
you only get a mouthful of sand."
As she says this, another customer enters. She forces her face into the
broad, empty Dubai smile and says: "And how may I help you tonight, sir?"
