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Sinister Paradise
Does the
Road to the Future End at Dubai?
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First Published on Thursday, July 14, 2005 by TomDispatch.com
by Mike Davis |
An Indentured, Invisible
Majority
The utopian character of Dubai,
it must be emphasized, is no mirage. Even more than
Singapore or Texas, the city-state really is an
apotheosis of neo-liberal values.
On the one hand, it provides
investors with a comfortable, Western-style,
property-rights regime, including freehold
ownership, that is unique in the region. Included
with the package is a broad tolerance of booze,
recreational drugs, halter tops, and other foreign
vices formally proscribed by Islamic law. (When
expats extol Dubai's unique "openness," it is this
freedom to carouse -- not to organize unions or
publish critical opinions -- that they are usually
praising.)
On the other hand, Dubai,
together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved
the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of
labor. Trade unions, strikes, and agitators are
illegal, and 99% of the private-sector workforce are
easily deportable non-citizens. Indeed, the deep
thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato
institutes must salivate when they contemplate the
system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.
At the top of the social pyramid,
of course, are the al-Maktoums and their cousins who
own every lucrative grain of sand in the sheikhdom.
Next, the native 15% percent of the population --
whose uniform of privilege is the traditional white
dishdash -- constitutes a leisure class whose
obedience to the dynasty is subsidized by income
transfers, free education, and government jobs. A
step below, are the pampered mercenaries:
150,000-or-so British ex-pats, along with other
European, Lebanese, and Indian managers and
professionals, who take full advantage of their
air-conditioned affluence and two-months of overseas
leave every summer.
However, South Asian contract
laborers, legally bound to a single employer and
subject to totalitarian social controls, make up the
great mass of the population. Dubai lifestyles are
attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan,
and Indian maids, while the building boom is carried
on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid
Pakistanis and Indians working twelve-hour shifts,
six and half days a week, in the blast-furnace
desert heat.
Dubai, like its neighbors, flouts
ILO labor regulations and refuses to adopt the
international Migrant Workers Convention. Human
Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of
building prosperity on "forced labor." Indeed, as
the British Independent recently emphasized
in an exposé on Dubai, "The labour market closely
resembles the old indentured labour system brought
to Dubai by its former colonial master, the
British."
"Like their impoverished
forefathers," the paper continued, "today's Asian
workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual
slavery for years when they arrive in the United
Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport
where recruitment agents confiscate their passports
and visas to control them"
In addition to being
super-exploited, Dubai's helots are also expected to
be generally invisible. The bleak work camps on the
city's outskirts, where laborers are crowded six,
eight, even twelve to a room, are not part of the
official tourist image of a city of luxury without
slums or poverty. In a recent visit, even the United
Arab Emirate's Minister of Labor was reported to be
profoundly shocked by the squalid, almost unbearable
conditions in a remote work camp maintained by a
large construction contractor. Yet when the laborers
attempted to form a union to win back pay and
improve living conditions, they were promptly
arrested.
Paradise, however, has even
darker corners than the indentured-labor camps. The
Russian girls at the elegant hotel bar are but the
glamorous facade of a sinister sex trade built on
kidnapping, slavery, and sadistic violence. Dubai --
any of the hipper guidebooks will advise -- is the
"Bangkok of the Middle East," populated with
thousands of Russian, Armenian, Indian, and Iranian
prostitutes controlled by various transnational
gangs and mafias. (The city, conveniently, is also a
world center for money laundering, with an estimated
10% of real estate changing hands in cash-only
transactions.)
Sheikh Mo and his thoroughly
modern regime, of course, disavow any connection to
this burgeoning red-light industry, although
insiders know that the whores are essential to
keeping all those five-star hotels full of European
and Arab businessmen. But the Sheikh himself has
been personally linked to Dubai's most scandalous
vice: child slavery.
Camel racing is a local passion
in the Emirates, and in June 2004, Anti-Slavery
International released photos of pre-school-age
child jockeys in Dubai. HBO Real Sports
simultaneously reported that the jockeys, "some as
young as three -- are kidnapped or sold into
slavery, starved, beaten and raped." Some of the
tiny jockeys were shown at a Dubai camel track owned
by the al-Maktoums.
The Lexington Herald-Leader -- a newspaper in Kentucky, where Sheikh Mo has two
large thoroughbred farms -- confirmed parts of the
HBO story in an interview with a local blacksmith
who had worked for the crown prince in Dubai. He
reported seeing "little bitty kids" as young as four
astride racing camels. Camel trainers claim that the
children's shrieks of terror spur the animals to a
faster effort.
Sheikh Mo, who fancies himself a
prophet of modernization, likes to impress visitors
with clever proverbs and heavy aphorisms. A
favorite: "Anyone who does not attempt to change the
future will stay a captive of the past."
Yet the future that he is
building in Dubai -- to the applause of billionaires
and transnational corporations everywhere -- looks
like nothing so much as a nightmare of the past:
Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the shores of
Araby.
Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities and the forthcoming Monster at the
Door: the Global Threat of Avian Influenza (New
Press 2005).
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