DUBAI - ILLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR - Dubai is uniquely vulnerable

DUBAI - ILLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR

Dubai is uniquely vulnerable

Stes de Necker

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 Countless building constructions are standing half-finished, seemingly abandoned.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out.

In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis Hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5 bn on its own artificial island – rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof.

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 into history.

There is no concept of bankruptcy in Dubai. If someone gets into debt and they can't pay, they go to prison. As soon as someone quits his/her job in Dubai, the employer has to inform the bank. If such a person have any outstanding debts that aren't covered by their savings, then all their accounts are frozen, and they are forbidden to leave the country.

All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in cars. Nothing is what it seems. Dubai isn't a city, it's an elaborate con-job.

Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert, inhabited only by cactuses and tumbleweed and scorpions. But downtown there are traces of the town that once was, buried amidst the metal and glass. In the dusty fort of the Dubai Museum, a sanitised version of this story is told.

In the mid-18th century, a small village was built here, in the lower Persian Gulf, where people would dive for pearls off the coast.

It soon began to accumulate a cosmopolitan population washing up from Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and other Arab countries, all hoping to make their fortune. They named it after a local locust, the daba, which consumed everything before it.

The town was soon seized by the gunships of the British Empire, who held it as late as 1971. As they scuttled away, Dubai decided to ally with the six surrounding states and make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The British quit just as oil was being discovered, and the sheikhs, who were left in charge, suddenly found themselves facing a remarkable dilemma. They were largely illiterate nomads who spent their lives driving camels through the desert – yet now they owned a vast pot of gold.

Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi – so Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the revenues to build something that would last.

Like Israel used to boast it made the desert bloom, Sheikh Maktoum resolved to make the desert bloom. He would build a city to be a centre of tourism and financial services, sucking up cash and talent from across the globe. He invited the world to come tax-free – and they came in their millions, swamping the local population, who now make up just 5 per cent of Dubai.

A whole city seemed to fall from the sky in just three decades, whole and complete and swelling. They fast-forwarded from the 18th century to the 21st in a single generation.

But it is not the sheikh that built the city. It was built by slaves.

There are three different Dubai’s, all swirling around each other.

There are the expats, there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed, and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here.

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who are building 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 lately the expats 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 ".

A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths of expats from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide. The Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.

Dubai is currently being reduced to its component sounds: do-buy, but in the most expensive malls shops are standing empty.

Between the malls, there is nothing but the connecting tissue of asphalt. Every road has at least four lanes. Dubai looks like a motorway punctuated by shopping centres.

Dubai is a dictatorship. The royal family own the country, and the people are their servants. There is very little freedom in Dubai. Most companies are owned by the Government, so it comes as no surprise that they oppose human rights laws; because it will reduce their profit margins.

The last time there was a depression, there was a starburst of democracy in Dubai, seized by force from the sheikhs.

In the 1930s, the city's merchants banded together against Sheikh Said bin Maktum al-Maktum – the absolute ruler of his day – and insisted they be given control over the state finances. It lasted only a few years, before the Sheikh – with the enthusiastic support of the British – snuffed them out.

Sheikh Mohammed has turned Dubai into ‘Creditopolis’, a city built entirely on debt.

Dubai owes 107 percent of its entire GDP. It would have gone bust already if the neighbouring oil-soaked state of Abu Dhabi hadn't bailed them out. Already, new media laws have been drafted forbidding the press to report on anything that could "damage" Dubai or "its economy". Dubai waves Islamism as the threat somewhere over the horizon. Every Imam is appointed by the Government, and every sermon is tightly controlled to keep it moderate.

Dumai’ns lives with a "psychological trauma". Their hearts are divided between pride on one side, and fear on the other.

All over Dubai, numerous projects that were under construction are now under collapse while projects that were completed just before the global economy crash, look empty and tattered.

The Atlantis Hotel was opened last winter in a $20m ‘fin-de-siecle’ party attended by Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan and Lily Allen. Sitting on its own fake island – shaped, of course like a palm tree – it looks like an immense upturned tooth in a faintly decaying mouth. But when it unexpectedly started raining, water was leaking from the roof, and tiles started falling off.

Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living beyond its ecological means as well. The new Tiger Woods Golf Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds.

The city is regularly washed over with dust-storms that fog up the skies and turn the skyline into a blur and when the dust parts, the heat burns through. It dehydrates anything that is not kept constantly, artificially wet. On average, Dubai only has enough water to last one week because there is no storage of fresh water.

Dubai was built in a place with no useable water. There is no surface water, very little aquifer, 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. Residents of Dubai have the biggest average carbon footprint of all human beings on earth– more than double that of the Americans.

When the recession turns into depression, Dubai will have a very big problem. 

Water is the main source of life and when water becomes unavailable, it would be a catastrophe. The average resident of Dubai needs three times more water to live on than any other average human being on earth.  

Global warming makes the problem even worse. If the sea level rises, most of all the artificial islands will disappear under the water.   

 

In the looming century of water stresses and a transition away from fossil fuels, Dubai is uniquely vulnerable.