Independent UK: The dark side of Dubai

[marmar]

The dark side of Dubai
Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Tuesday, 7 April 2009


The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

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

Karen Andrews can't speak. Every time she starts to tell her story, she puts her head down and crumples. She is slim and angular and has the faded radiance of the once-rich, even though her clothes are as creased as her forehead. I find her in the car park of one of Dubai's finest international hotels, where she is living, in her Range Rover. She has been sleeping here for months, thanks to the kindness of the Bangladeshi car park attendants who don't have the heart to move her on. This is not where she thought her Dubai dream would end.

Her story comes out in stutters, over four hours. At times, her old voice – witty and warm – breaks through. Karen came here from Canada when her husband was offered a job in the senior division of a famous multinational. "When he said Dubai, I said – if you want me to wear black and quit booze, baby, you've got the wrong girl. But he asked me to give it a chance. And I loved him."

All her worries melted when she touched down in Dubai in 2005. "It was an adult Disneyland, where Sheikh Mohammed is the mouse," she says. "Life was fantastic. You had these amazing big apartments, you had a whole army of your own staff, you pay no taxes at all. It seemed like everyone was a CEO. We were partying the whole time." ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

[Sal Minella]

1. This is an amazing read.

[MindMatter]

2. A medieval dictatorship. D'uh

A find myself stunned that there could possibly be anybody on the planet that would assume any Arab state would be different. I'm sorry to see that a lot of really trusting people got caught up in that, but really ...

[Lucky Luciano]

3. Very interesting article. I may have to reconsider my interest

in visiting Dubai - except that I do have a friend that lives there.

[DLnyc]

4. Worse than I imagined. Much worse.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[angstlessk]

5. What an engrossing and educational article. I had read a short article

which revealed some of what was written here, but this, by far, is the best I have read. In fact I am about to google earth Dubai to get a feel of what the writer was speaking about.

[Joe Chi Minh]

6. Wow. What an absolutely fascinating article - a first-hand account

by a very resourceful and empathetic journalist.

A surreal ostentation arising from an overweening presumption, an extraordinarily ingenuous hubris, with nemesis seemingly in the pipeline, are what springs to my mind. "Pride comes before a fall" in worldly affairs as well as spiritual, since they are connected.

It's the same incorrigibly conspicuous consumption of "new money" that obtains everywhere else, but to the power of "n". It's not that the "old money" types are not as keen on inordinate opulence as the "new money" types, but that it is tempered by worldly experience and a Christian faith passed down from Christian Norman times - which latter has somehow managed to co-exist with every level of venality, right up to imperial predation.

"Old money" has, at least, historically, always affected a disdain for "trade". Completely hypocritical, of course, since their own wealth was, if anything, less meritoriously obtained in the form of plunder, foreign and domestic. But with it, the more obvious excesses of "new money"'s love of Disneyesque, conspicious consumption, flaunting their wealth, was also eschewed, and that seems no bad thing. Hypocrisy has its place in our fallen world. Better that vice should pay tribute to virtue than not at all.

[Karenina]

7. The bigger they are...

:wow: