Dubai: A Morally Bankrupt Dictatorship Built by Slave Labor
Tom Davos
Published on Friday, November 27, 2009 by the Independent/UK
Dubai: A Morally Bankrupt Dictatorship Built by Slave Labor
by Johann Hari
Dubai is finally financially bankrupt - but it has been morally
bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the
Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time.
Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts and the Gucci styles, but
beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.
If you go there with your eyes open - as I did earlier this year - the
truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging
Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the
country's hereditary ruler.
It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long
chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of
the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told
not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming,
and trapped into staying.
In their home country - Bangladesh or the Philippines or India - these
workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large
upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them,
and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were
promised.
They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just
to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy
tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to
open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike
for better conditions, they are beaten by the police.
I met so many men in this position I stopped counting, just as the
embassies were told to stop counting how many workers die in these
conditions every year after they figured it topped more than 1,000
among the Indians alone.
Human Rights Watch calls this system "slavery." Yet the Westerners who
have flocked to Dubai brag that they "love" the city, because they
don't have to pay any taxes, and they have domestic slaves to do all
the hard work. They train themselves not to see the pain.
But Dubai's bankruptcy does not end there: it is ecologically bust.
This is a city built in the burning desert, where everything shrivels
up and blows away if it is not kept artificially cold all the time.
That's why it has the highest per capita carbon emissions on earth -
some 250 percent higher even than America's. The city has to ship in
desalinated water - which is more costly than oil. When it runs out of
cash, it will run out of water.
Today Dubai will be bailed out by the United Arab Emirates, the
oil-rich country of which it is only one state. But the oil will not
last forever. More importantly, there is no Bank of Morality that
could provide a bailout for this sinister mirage in the desert.
B) 2009 Independent/UK
Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported
from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic,
Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in
publications all over the world.