I never really did like Dubai

Published by LookingToSee on 20 June, 2013 - 23:10

ever been to Dubai? how did you find it?

hoping to do Dubai? why?

heres an article entitled "the dark side of Dubai" (yes, i did say it with that funny, scary voice)

I'll try and post some snipets for those out there too lazy to read the whole thing.

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

"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

i dont know why it WONT PASTE!

 

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?

 

IV. Mauled by the mall

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.

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

...

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?"

VI. Dubai Pride

"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."

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.

...

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."

...

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."

...

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.

 

VIII. The End of The World

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.

IX. Taking on the Desert

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 America

X. Fake Plastic Trees

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?

 

i was young and didnt know much about teh world (less than now) back when I first heard of Dubai, first those fake island making surprised me, then i got scared and thought this whole thing was crazy. I've never wanted to go there and people lose respect in my eyes when they go there. Ive always being disintered in Dubai (And maybe a tad bit mroe than disinterested if the fact that people go to Dubai lowers them in my eyes..) but now, after reading that article, i think my disintered is turning into something like disgust. I think we need to boycott Dubai.

someone in the bus today had a bag that said

"one cannot think well, love well, sleep well,

IF ONE HAS NOT DINED well"

i thought the last sentence should have been "if ANOTHER one has not DINED at all"

Comments

Submitted by You on 20 June, 2013 - 23:38

More than that is how foriegn workers are treated. but this applies to most/all arab countries.

Very inhumane.

—

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'" - David Cameron, UK Prime Minister. 13 May 2015.

Submitted by TPOS on 21 June, 2013 - 01:18

I've read about how people treat workers in Dubai before and that along with it's general, fake, materialisticness makes me really hate Dubai. May be hate is a strong word? I definitely don't like it though!

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"How many people find fault in what they're reading and the fault is in their own understanding" Al Mutanabbi

Submitted by Seraphim on 21 June, 2013 - 09:05

You should visit the place first, befor you judge it.

Anything less is a waste of material.

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Back in BLACK

Submitted by LookingToSee on 21 June, 2013 - 09:47

Seraphim wrote:
You should visit the place first, befor you judge it.

Anything less is a waste of material.

you should be a slavemaster before you judge it

you should be a racist before you judge it

you should be an atheist/christian/hindu/sikh/jew before you judge it

you should be a zionist before you judge it.

you should be an american politician before you judge it

I'm a human. thats more than enough.

 

the article mentions the slaves (or workers)

you lot too lazy to read the article, point 3 is allabout them, and they are referred to often in the whole article.

 

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.

—

Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

Submitted by Seraphim on 21 June, 2013 - 13:51

"Looking To See" wrote:
you should be a slavemaster before you judge it
 
you should be a racist before you judge it
 
you should be an atheist/christian/hindu/sikh/jew before you judge it
 
you should be a zionist before you judge it.
 
you should be an american politician before you judge it
 
I'm a human. thats more than enough.

Now thats just childish. And yes i was already aware that Dubai was built by Slaves and still is. Having already been to Dubai and actually know someone working out there and the way he gets treated.

But you're naive if you think that Dubai is the only city thats been built by Slaves. I would bet that a lot of countrys and cities were built by slaves. And yet i dont see you ranting about them? Or are you waiting on a Documentary about that too?

Maybe you should do what your name suggests and actually Look to See, because this being human business is what started the slave trade.

—

Back in BLACK

Submitted by You on 21 June, 2013 - 18:02

You dont have to have gone to a place to question its ethics.

Yes there are other places that do the same.

AFAIK Manchester doesn't.

—

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'" - David Cameron, UK Prime Minister. 13 May 2015.

Submitted by LookingToSee on 22 June, 2013 - 17:31

Seraphim wrote:

But you're naive if you think that Dubai is the only city thats been built by Slaves. I would bet that a lot of countrys and cities were built by slaves. And yet i dont see you ranting about them? Or are you waiting on a Documentary about that too?

Maybe you should do what your name suggests and actually Look to See, because this being human business is what started the slave trade.

im being childish? calling me naive by assuming that i think only Dubai is built by slave. did i say that anywhere?

my problem is that this is a MUSLIM place. where lots of MUSLIMS go on holiday there.

i'll rant abt whatever i want, whenever i want. Dubai is in my spotlight at the mo.

and now, attack on my username. what exactly you want me to see? that its okay to go to Dubai on holiday? that i shouldnt lose respect for people who go there?

"being human started teh slave trade" want to enlighten us on THAT particular point?

—

Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

Submitted by Hummus on 6 July, 2013 - 20:23

I once wanted to venture out to Dubai because it's a holiday destination but later on it didn't really appeal to me. I really liked their 'artificial' palm islands but I'd rather go elsewhere. Too many tall builidngs for my liking. There's not much floor to look at.

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Submitted by LookingToSee on 6 July, 2013 - 23:26

why is artificial in quotation marks? because it is 100% authentically artificial!

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Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

Submitted by Hummus on 7 July, 2013 - 09:11

Looking To See wrote:
why is artificial in quotation marks? because it is 100% authentically artificial!

Its precisely what you've mentioned. How many do they have? 2? 3?

Would've been cool if they were 0% artificial. 

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Submitted by LookingToSee on 7 July, 2013 - 18:53

Hummus wrote:

Its precisely what you've mentioned. How many do they have? 2? 3?

Would've been cool if they were 0% artificial. 

dont know (and dont care either tbh) and 0% artificial? that exist too. we usually call them islands. they're dotted around continents. actually, you're standing on one right now, feel special.

—

Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

Submitted by Hummus on 8 July, 2013 - 18:07

Looking To See wrote:
Hummus wrote:

Its precisely what you've mentioned. How many do they have? 2? 3?

Would've been cool if they were 0% artificial. 

dont know (and dont care either tbh) and 0% artificial? that exist too. we usually call them islands. they're dotted around continents. actually, you're standing on one right now, feel special.

*Feeling special* I always found the concept of living on an island amazing until I realised that i'm already living on one. 

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Submitted by LookingToSee on 8 July, 2013 - 22:55

Titanium wrote:
Its may be artificial but a very successful and a thriving place. 

 

actually it isnt. and its build on slavery so it will never be.

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Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

Submitted by You on 8 July, 2013 - 23:45

Thriving as in people go there and there is wealth.

We are discussing it because people do go there, even if we may find it unappealing for many reasons.

—

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'" - David Cameron, UK Prime Minister. 13 May 2015.