Sun, Sand and Slavery

Published by Ya'qub on 22 May, 2007 - 10:30

So who's planning a lovely holiday to Dubai this year?

This article is a little long but I think it is really worth reading.

Quote:
[size=18][b]Sun, sand and slavery[/b][/size]

[b]Dubai is luring holidaymakers with the world's most lavish hotels. But, in the second extract from his book about the real cost of tourism, Leo Hickman looks at the plight of the workers building a dream destination[/b]

If you drive along the al-Ain highway you pass mile after mile of signs marking the location of what will soon be known as Dubailand. Once completed, this will be the world's largest theme park, twice the size of Florida's Disney World. Scheduled to open between 2015 and 2018, it aims to be the centrepiece of Dubai's tourism infrastructure, attracting up to 200,000 visitors a day. Already, a replica Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower stand awkwardly in the desert.

Dubai Holding, which is building the mega-project, says that at 278 sq km it will include the world's largest shopping mall, the world's largest observation wheel, 29 sq km of themed worlds, including "Women's World", and 75 sq km of "Eco-tourism World", including a safari park, a vast sporting complex and a snowdome six times bigger than Ski Dubai - the emirate's existing 25-storey skiing centre, where around 30 tonnes of snow are created each night as chilled water is sprayed from 21 snow-makers attached to the roof. Yet, according to last year's United Nations report Global Deserts Outlook, the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part, is now one of the most "water-imperilled" nations in the world, while also one of the most water-hungry.

Undaunted, Dubailand will have nearly 30,000 rooms spread across 31 hotels to accommodate its visitors, including one called Asia-Asia, which, with 6,500 rooms, will become the world's largest hotel. Dubai is unchallenged, it seems, in claiming the world record for the largest number of "world's largest" building projects. Nowhere else on Earth - not even in China - is anything being built on this scale. A new six-runway airport is under construction, its name a clue to its ambition: Dubai World Central International airport.

Given Dubai's reputation for luxury, it is fitting that my "room" for the night is at the Burj al-Arab, the dhow-shaped building that has come to define its location as much as Sydney's Opera House or Bilbao's Guggenheim museum. Many claim this to be the world's most expensive hotel, with prices ranging from $1,000-$28,000 a night. I say "room", but the Burj al-Arab, which sits on its own artificial island, doesn't actually have any single rooms. It offers "duplexes" - suites that extend over two floors. And I must add that I am a guest of the hotel - few journalists could afford afternoon tea here, let alone the cost of a duplex.

Once my eyes have adjusted to the surfaces of gold, mosaic, marble or mirror that seem to embellish every surface of my Burj al-Arab duplex, I begin to notice details such as the 13-option pillow menu and a personal-butler service that includes, for the eye-watering fee of 2,500 UAE dirhams (about £350), the option of having a scented-oil-filled bath run for you, with caviar and champagne left beside the pile of pressed towels. Dubai is famous for its service culture: it is one of the things that always rates highly in visitor surveys. Hotel staff can even appear on the beach, asking if you need your sunglasses wiped. But how does the emirate afford to employ its vast army of service staff, from the cleaners and waiters through to the chefs and pool attendants? And what of the even larger number of construction workers who are busy building some of the other parts of Dubai's swelling tourist infrastructure? The subject is a burr on the emirate's highly polished gold.

An hour's drive into an area of Dubai that is about as far off the tourist map as it is possible to get brings us to Sonapur, an unhappy place in so many ways. Even its name cruelly teases its residents. The name of Dubai's largest labour camp means "city of gold" in Hindi, and it also sounds very similar to the local slang word for a female orgasm, as Khaled, my translator, seems to rejoice in telling me.

I doubt that most of the 150,000 male workers who live here (some claim it is as many as 500,000, but there is little official headcounting going on), smile at the irony of living in a place so empty of wealth and women.

As we pass the large cemetery on the road into Sonapur, a long convoy of buses heads in the opposite direction towards the hundreds of building sites across Dubai. Curtains screening the workers from the sun flap violently in the open windows as drivers move up through the gears, spewing a dirty diesel puff at every shift. On entering the huge settlement - "town" doesn't seem the right term as there's no sign of cinemas, libraries, restaurants, or even any landscaping - we pass block upon block of concrete walls, some topped with barbed wire and all fronted by large metal gates. Inside, Khaled says, are housing units, some of which are home for up to 500 workers, owned by the dozens of contractors that feed Dubai's construction boom.

In a room in the compound we perch rather tentatively on the bed to talk to three of the workers, friends who live together, sharing a room with five others. Rahmatula, an Afghan in his late 20s whose pumice-rough hands are in sharp contrast to his disarmingly soft green eyes, gives me a picture of his typical day. It starts, he says, at 5.30am when he quickly gets up and, without having breakfast, boards a bus. By six he is at the building site, where hundreds of luxury villas are being constructed, and immediately starts moving bricks by hand. "I have 15 minutes for my lunch 'hour'," he says. "I always eat roti bread with vegetable curry made the night before, which I bring with me." He says that he's not allowed to stop again, even if he's hot and needs water. If he does, pay will be deducted from his salary. "I've been working here for five years and my salary is now 800 dirhams [£110] a month, but with overtime I get it up to 1,100. I send home 600 dirhams a month," he says with evident pride.

I can't help looking at his sweat-stained shirt and thinking of the bath-and-caviar service at the Burj al-Arab. It would take Rahmatula more than three months of picking up bricks, I calculate, to earn enough money to pay for such a bath. And his friends have similar tales to tell.

He finishes work about 5pm and gets back to the compound about six, due to the traffic. After a shower and a rest, he eats his dinner at nine, goes to pray, and is in bed by ten o'clock. This is his life for six days a week: he gets Friday off work, but spends much of the day cleaning clothes or cooking. 'It's like a prison sentence, I suppose," he says. "I haven't seen my wife for five years, but I'm going home to Khost [a region on the Afghan-Pakistan border] next month." His emerald eyes moisten at the thought.

We step back out into the heat and walk down one of the long alleyways that divide the housing units. Clothes hang drying from lines attached to every available eave. The men show me a bathroom with a long line of open-sided baths and, further along, a filthy kitchen with more than 20 gas stoves but no refrigerators. Khaled says that he's been to other camps in Sonapur with even worse conditions. At some, workers are prevented from cooking their own food and are made to pay for a canteen service, which they complain is overpriced and of highly questionable quality and hygiene. In neighbouring camps the workers have to pay for water and electricity and regularly complain about restrictions: in some extreme cases, the owners switch on the services for only an hour a day.

In Dubai, where as a tourist you rarely part company with air conditioning, be it in the car, the mall, the hotel or the restaurant, it is easy to forget that not everyone can take it for granted.

It is also easy to forget that Dubai today - and tomorrow - simply would not exist without these workers, nor would the hotels, pools, shopping malls and holiday homes that the millions of tourists who visit Dubai each year all enjoy. Beneath the alluring veneer lies something altogether more uncomfortable.