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.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html
Construction workers in their distinctive blue overalls building the upper floors a new Dubai tower, with the distinctive Burj al-Arab hotel in the background
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-manqué 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.
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?"
Some names in this article have been changed.
