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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 |
The narration begins: As your jet starts its
descent, you are glued to your window. The scene
below is astonishing: a 24-square-mile archipelago
of coral-colored islands in the shape of an almost
finished puzzle of the world. In the shallow green
waters between continents, the sunken shapes of the
Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Coliseum are clearly
visible.
In the distance are three other
large island groups configured as palms within
crescents and planted with high-rise resorts,
amusement parks, and a thousand mansions built on
stilts over the water. The "Palms" are connected by
causeways to a Miami-like beachfront chock-a-block
full of mega-hotels, apartment high-rises and yacht
marinas.
As the plane slowly banks toward
the desert mainland, you gasp at the even more
improbable vision ahead. Out of a chrome forest of
skyscrapers (nearly a dozen taller than 1000 feet)
soars a new Tower of Babel. It is an impossible
one-half-mile high: the equivalent of the Empire
State Building stacked on top of itself.
You are still rubbing your eyes
with wonderment and disbelief when the plane lands
and you are welcomed into an airport emporium where
hundreds of shops seduce you with Gucci bags,
Cartier watches, and one-kilogram bars of solid
gold. You make a mental note to pick up some
duty-free gold on your way out.
The hotel driver is waiting for
you in a Rolls Royce Silver Seraph. Friends have
recommended the Armani Hotel in the 160-story tower
or the seven-star hotel with an atrium so huge that
the Statue of Liberty would fit inside, but instead
you have opted to fulfill a childhood fantasy. You
always have wanted to be Captain Nemo in Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Your jellyfish-shaped hotel is,
in fact, exactly 66 feet below the sea surface. Each
of its 220 luxury suites has clear Plexiglas walls
that provide spectacular views of passing mermaids
as well as the hotel's famed "underwater fireworks:"
a hallucinatory exhibition of "water bubbles,
swirled sand, and carefully deployed lighting." Any
initial anxiety about the safety of your sea-bottom
resort is dispelled by the smiling concierge. The
structure has a multi-level failsafe security
system, he reassures you, that includes protection
against terrorist submarines as well as missiles and
aircraft.
Although you have an important
business meeting at the Internet City free-trade
zone with clients from Hyderabad and Taipei, you
have arrived a day early to treat yourself to one of
the famed adventures at the Restless Planet dinosaur
theme park. Indeed, after a soothing night's sleep
under the sea, you are aboard a monorail headed for
a Jurassic jungle. Your expedition encounters some
peacefully grazing Apatosaurs, but you are soon
attacked by a nasty gang of velociraptors. The
animatronic beasts are so flawlessly lifelike -- in
fact, they have been designed by experts from the
British Museum of Natural History -- that you shriek
in fear and delight.
With your adrenaline pumped-up by
this close call, you polish off the afternoon with
some thrilling snowboarding on the local black
diamond run. Next door is the Mall of Arabia, the
world's largest mall -- the altar of the city's
famed Shopping Festival that attracts 5 million
frenetic consumers each January -- but you postpone
the temptation.
Instead, you indulge in some
expensive Thai fusion cuisine at a restaurant near
Elite Towers that was recommended by your hotel
driver. The gorgeous Russian blond at the bar keeps
staring at you with almost vampire-like hunger, and
you wonder whether the local sin scene is as
extravagant as the shopping…..
The Sequel to Blade Runner?
Welcome to paradise. But where
are you? Is this a new science-fiction novel from
Margaret Atwood, the sequel to Blade Runner,
or Donald Trump tripping on acid?
No, it is the Persian Gulf
city-state of Dubai in 2010.
After Shanghai (current
population: 15 million), Dubai (current population:
1.5 million) is the world's biggest building site:
an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption
and what locals dub "supreme lifestyles."
Dozens of outlandish
mega-projects -- including "The World" (an artificial archipelago), Burj Dubai (the Earth's tallest building), the
Hydropolis (that underwater luxury hotel, the Restless Planet theme park, a domed ski resort
perpetually maintained in 40C heat, and The Mall of
Arabia, a hyper-mall -- are actually under
construction or will soon leave the drawing boards.
Under the enlightened despotism
of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the
Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the
new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although
often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or
Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their
collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the
bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a
chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of
the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney,
Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings &
Merrill.
Multibillionaire Sheik Mo -- as
he's affectionately known to Dubai's expats -- not
only collects thoroughbreds (the world's largest
stable) and super-yachts (the 525-foot-long Project
Platinum which has its own submarine and flight
deck), but also seems to have imprinted Robert
Venturi's cult Learning from Las Vegas in the same
way that more pious Moslems have memorized The
Quran. (One of the Sheik's proudest
achievements, by the way, is to have introduced
gated communities to Arabia.)
Under his leadership, the coastal
desert has become a huge circuit board into which
the elite of transnational engineering firms and
retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech
clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands,
"cities within cities" -- whatever is the latest fad
in urban capitalism. The same phantasmagoric but
generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in
dozens of aspiring cities these days, but Sheik Mo
has a distinctive and inviolable criterion:
Everything must be "world class," by which he means
number one in The Guinness Book of Records.
Thus Dubai is building the world's largest theme
park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and
the first sunken hotel among other firsts.
Sheikh Mo's architectural
megalomania, although reminiscent of Albert Speer
and his patron, is not irrational. Having "learned
from Las Vegas," he understands that if Dubai wants
to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle
East and South Asia (its officially defined "home
market" of 1.6 billion), it must ceaselessly strive
for excess.
From this standpoint, the city's
monstrous caricature of futurism is simply shrewd
marketing. Its owners love it when designers and
urbanists anoint it as the cutting edge. Architect
George Katodrytis wrote: "Dubai may be considered
the emerging prototype for the 21st century:
prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated
cities that extend out over the land and sea."
Moreover, Dubai can count on the
peak-oil epoch to cover the costs of these
hyperboles. Each time you spent $40 to fill your
tank, you are helping to irrigate Sheik Mo's oasis.
Precisely because Dubai is
rapidly pumping the last of its own modest endowment
of oil, it has opted to become the postmodern "city
of nets" -- as Bertolt Brecht called his fictional
boomtown of Mahoganny -- where the super-profits of
oil are to be reinvested in Arabia's one truly
inexhaustible natural resource: sand. (Indeed
mega-projects in Dubai are usually measured by
volumes of sand moved: 1 billion cubic feet in the
case of The World.)
Al-Qaeda and the war on terrorism
deserve some of the credit for this boom. Since
9/11, many Middle Eastern investors, fearing
possible lawsuits or sanctions, have pulled up
stakes in the West. According Salman bin Dasmal of
Dubai Holdings, the Saudis alone have repatriated
one-third of their trillion-dollar overseas
portfolio. The sheikhs are bringing it back home,
and last year, the Saudis were believed to have
ploughed at least $7 billion into Dubai's sand
castles.
Another aqueduct of oil wealth
flows from the neighboring Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The
two statelets dominate the United Arab Emirates -- a
quasi-nation thrown together by Sheik Mo's father
and the ruler of Abu Dhabi in 1971 to fend off
threats from Marxists in Oman and, later, Islamists
in Iran.
Today, Dubai's security is
guaranteed by the American nuclear super-carriers
usually berthed at the port of Jebel Ali. Indeed,
the city-state aggressively promotes itself as the
ultimate elite "Green Zone" in an increasingly
turbulent and dangerous region.
Meanwhile, as increasing numbers
of experts warn that the age of cheap oil is
passing, the al-Maktoum clan can count on a torrent
of nervous oil revenue seeking a friendly and stable
haven. When outsiders question the sustainability of
the current boom, Dubai officials point out that
their new Mecca is being built on equity, not debt.
Since a watershed 2003 decision
to open unrestricted freehold ownership to
foreigners, wealthy Europeans and Asians have rushed
to become part of the Dubai bubble. A beachfront in
one of the "Palms" or, better yet, a private island
in "The World" now has the cachet of St. Tropez or
Grand Cayman. The old colonial masters lead the pack
as Brit expats and investors have become the biggest
cheerleaders for Sheikh Mo's dreamworld: David
Beckham owns a beach and Rod Stewart, an island
(rumored, in fact, to be named Great Britain).
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).
The narration begins
| The Sequel to Blade Runner?
| An Indentured, Invisible Majority
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