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The dark side of Dubai


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There is an article now in the Independent about what is really going on in Dubai.

 

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

 

This is a really, REALLY long article about Dubai and the culture and people there. While it isn't about theme parks specifically, it does talk a lot about the tourism there and how all those attractions and skyscrapers are built.

 

I'll only quote a section of it, you should really read the whole thing. It's pretty depressing.

 

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.

 

It really makes you think twice about all the theme park companies getting involved there.

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Thanks for the link, man that was a depressing read, but it's not that surprising to me that all of that really is happening with the slave class. And it's a good thing none of the theme park companies really have much invested of their own money into these Dubai projects as I'm sure it would be hurting them a lot more if they didn't just license there name out to the other companies that are actually building the park over there.

 

And it's scary to hear how ill prepared the whole city is really when it comes to anything really. Water will only last them a week? I realize that the world isn't going to stop using oil anytime soon, but still, that's pretty poor planning on their part. Also the pollution sounds horrible, with no end in the near future as well. Man Dubai is all sorts of screwed up! lol

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I'm not surprised considering the fact that Dubai is growing at a rapid pace and they have to recieve their labor from somewhere.

 

The laborers have to live somewhere so shantytowns are built around the city for the workers.

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Wow....the city of Dubai is pathetic if they stoop that freakin low to get people to work for them. You cannot imagine what kind of thoughts are going through my head right now, about 90% of them aren't TPR friendly.

 

I'm seriously having some dark thoughts about those skyscapers now, this is just incredibly patheic and inhumane....dear god....

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Sadly, it doesn't shock me at all.

When i saw a few sweat-shop videos about major tennis shoe makers around the world, my eyes got opened big time.

 

"Yachim makes 4 dollars US a day because he cranks out several dozen pairs of shoes a day. Ironically, given what he makes a day, it would take him 31 days to earn enough to buy one pair."

 

Look at it this way: Who built the pyramids and temples?

Not much has changed in many parts of the world.

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I remember saying this here a long time ago, and being taken to task by someone who lived there: Dubai is Not A Nice Place.

 

On the t'other hand, let's remember that in the USA, a third of the wealth is held by the top one percent, another half by the next 19%, and the bottom 80% own just one-sixth of the nation's wealth. Our infant mortality rate is higher than most industrialized countries', over twice Japan's and about the same as Croatia's and Lithuania's, and it's estimated that one out of six American kids lives in poverty.

 

The man behind the curtain, indeed.

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Fact check, since you didn't post any sources or real figures.

 

Twice as much as 3 is 6, you are correct.

 

Yes... that certainly sounds bad. Until you find out that Croatia and Lithuania actually have really low rates and that ANY nation compared to the best looks bad.

 

Our 6 deaths per 1,000 can certainly be better, but the world average is 50 deaths per 1,000.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate

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^^ True, and perhaps I was unfair with that figure....though it might also be worth noting that our hemispheric whipping boy, Cuba, has a lower rate than we do. Certainly, the fate of American workers is nowhere near as awful as the indentured servitude of workers in Dubai. But the US does, like Dubai, have great disparities of wealth and poverty - if memory serves, just about the biggest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world, and the gap has been growing. (It's even more strikiing if you look only at financial wealth.)

 

The two situations are not equivalent. But we DO have a super-rich class being serviced by the rest of us, and the last couple of years have pointed out how precarious the well-being of many of us is. That's all I was trying to say.

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This really shouldn't surprise anyone. Dubai is just as uncivilized as the rest of the region, it just has prettier buildings. I wish our park franchises wouldn't get involved in this mess.

I'm sorry, but calling the area uncivilized is just... wrong. Many countries were like this at one point in time including the US and the UK.

 

Wow....the city of Dubai is pathetic if they stoop that freakin low to get people to work for them. You cannot imagine what kind of thoughts are going through my head right now, about 90% of them aren't TPR friendly.

 

I'm seriously having some dark thoughts about those skyscapers now, this is just incredibly patheic and inhumane....dear god....

 

Its all about money. In order to build all those buildings at a fast pace, they have to hire workers from other countries. They are paid low in order to keep costs for labor and buildings down.

 

A lot of countries were victims of exploiting workers for low pay, like Chine and even the US.

 

I would still like to visit Dubai though.

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This really shouldn't surprise anyone. Dubai is just as uncivilized as the rest of the region, it just has prettier buildings. I wish our park franchises wouldn't get involved in this mess.

I'm sorry, but calling the area uncivilized is just... wrong. Many countries were like this at one point in time including the US and the UK.

 

And at that "point in time" the US and the UK were uncivilized.

 

I don't think the uncivilized comment was only regarding the "foreign workers" but also lack of rights for some groups of people.

 

dubaidave - thanks for posting but I am shocked that this is a surprise to so many since I thought a lot of this was common knowledge. At least I remember reading about a lot of this before.

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Not to mention how women are not allowed to walk around freely in Dubai and have to be covered at all times. I've heard some horror stories about this place too. Don't know why anyone would ever consider going there. Yes it looks pretty, but until their human rights join the rest of the world (mostly), I will never go there.

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Not to mention how women are not allowed to walk around freely in Dubai and have to be covered at all times.

 

Not to mention that homosexual sex is punishable by death...though lately it's only resulted in men being thrown in jail for five or ten years, or forcibly being subjected to hormone treatments.

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This does not surprise me at all, not only is Dubai the product of an ecenomic system thats pretty much collapsed its also in the middle east and who knows what the hell goes on there. Wasnt a fan of a lot of theme parks building in the middle east especially here, wouldnt surprise me to see some of these projects cancelled.

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Not to mention that homosexual sex is punishable by death...though lately it's only resulted in men being thrown in jail for five or ten years, or forcibly being subjected to hormone treatments.

 

Hmmm I wonder if this is a place like Iran where as Amadenajda (probably wrong spelling but I could care less) "there are no gays" lol

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I heard a story from a family friend who's son (a pilot) went to work for an airline in Dubai last year. They owned him from the time he touched down until he quit. He was told when to eat, when to sleep, they had complete control over him.

 

Dubai is not somewhere I plan to go anytime soon.

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Not to mention how women are not allowed to walk around freely in Dubai and have to be covered at all times. I've heard some horror stories about this place too. Don't know why anyone would ever consider going there. Yes it looks pretty, but until their human rights join the rest of the world (mostly), I will never go there.

 

No, thats not Dubai. Your thinking Saudi..Dubai is fairly liberal in THAT regard.

 

Now if the government would only let us drill for our own oil, and at the same time adjust our infastructure to start creating hydrogen fueling stations, places like Dubai will be ghostowns in a decade or so!

 

Dubai has next to no oil at this point. They were pretty smart to transition their economy to tourism and business like they have. Also, the majority of investment money is coming from foreign sources at this point..

That article is pretty sensationalist but not very far from the truth, at least from what Ive seen (I was only in Dubai for 3 days, but I spent 5 months in Qatar, which is pretty similar with respect to worker treatment)

 

What pisses me off even more is that these same papers were just months ago talking about how Dubai is the world's next big thing. But, at soon as the economy tanks and Dubai loses its luster, they go after all the worker-treatment stories they were all too happy to ignore for years (yea, im mad at both the media and the goverment). Dubai is a big mirage IMO...the demand for their ridiculous projects has never really existed.

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And at that "point in time" the US and the UK were uncivilized.

 

I don't think the uncivilized comment was only regarding the "foreign workers" but also lack of rights for some groups of people.

 

A bit old, but countries like the US and UK are still like that today with workers exploiting illegal immigrants and companies outsourcing.

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And at that "point in time" the US and the UK were uncivilized.

 

I don't think the uncivilized comment was only regarding the "foreign workers" but also lack of rights for some groups of people.

 

A bit old, but countries like the US and UK are still like that today with workers exploiting illegal immigrants and companies outsourcing.

 

Illegal immigrants are a bit of a different matter. The US spends a LOT of money trying to keep them out. Are they probably taken advantage of inside of the US? Sure. But its entirely different from the mideast, where the workers are in contracts with their employer that make switching to another job impossible and leaving the country without the employers permission illegal...

Outsourcing is too a different matter. Its not like the workers in other countries are being forced to do jobs at less wages than they were promised..

 

This thread should probably be headed towards the Random forum at this point..

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