THE ROVING
EYE Dubai lives the post-oil Arab
dream By Pepe Escobar
DUBAI - Welcome to the ultimate
sociopolitical model for the 21st century: a
Blade Runner-esque melting pot of
neo-liberalism and "subterranean" economy, Sunni
Arab Islam and low taxes, souks and
artificial islands, a giant warehouse and a
tourist paradise, life in the fast lane and
post-modern slavery. The model spells out an
apolitical, consumer-mad, citizenship-free
society.
Dubai, population 700,000, is a
self-described "door to a market of more than 1
billion consumers". Its drive is to fashion itself
not only as the first post-oil economy in the
Persian Gulf but as one of the great postmodern
world cities. Dubai represents the essence of
globalization at work - globalization, of course,
interpreted as the ineluctable triumph of Western
laissez faire, where world trade means economic rights
trump political rights.
The Bedouin Sheikh
Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan founded the Persian Gulf nation styled
the United Arab Emirates - composed of seven
city-states - in 1971. When he died in early
November 2004, he was a multibillionaire owner of
banks, industries and villas on Spain's Costa del
Sol and Switzerland's Lake Geneva. But he still
preferred falcon hunting and camel racing to being
an Arab version of the Rothschilds.
Most
of all, he had every reason to be proud of his
family's intuition and business acumen - as
already in the 1940s they had decided to drain
Dubai's port while competitors were sleeping. And
he was certainly proud of the way Dubai had
evolved, a Hong Kong-by-the-desert with loads of
glitz, no "war on terror" and, of course, no free
elections. Sheikh Zayed was promised as he lay
dying that Dubai would continue to flourish - even
without gambling casinos. Not for long, it now
seems. Arab Las Vegas, anyone?
During the
Middle Ages, Gulf port cities were the essential
node in the Arabian Peninsula's monopoly on trade
between Europe and Southeast Asia. Today, Dubai as
a city-state/world port city by the "Arabian Gulf"
(locals wouldn't be caught dead referring to the
"Persian Gulf") is positioning itself as the
essential trade crossroads of Europe, Africa, the
Middle East and the South Asian subcontinent. The
richest of the seven city-states in the UAE may be
the capital, Abu Dhabi, floating on a sea of oil.
But 63% of the country's income now derives from
commerce and tourism, and the bulk transits
through Dubai.
In this mish-mash of
wealthy Arab women covered in silk black
chadors, Indian families in saris, young
poseurs with Iranian pop T-shirts, armies of men
in dishdashas and fake gold Rolexes,
phalanxes of Japanese minibuses and American
delivery vans, and the frenzy of trading
simultaneously in English, Arabic, Bengali, Urdu,
Turkish, Farsi, Russian, German, Tagalog, Thai,
Gujarati, Afrikaans or Swahili, the lingua franca
is indisputably English, not Arabic.
In
the totally deregulated airport, anyone may land
piloting any sort of aircraft. As much gold as is
extracted all over the world transits every year
through Dubai, legally or through smuggling. Even
as it strives to replicate Singapore, Dubai feels
more like Houston - but with better restaurants,
much better cars, much smoother roads and much
more alluring state-of-the-art architecture.
An army of abnormal citizens
Only 25% of the multicultural 2.4 million
people living in the UAE are citizens - or
"nationals", as they are known in local lingo. In
Dubai they represent only 15%. No wonder Dubai
boasts no fewer than 85 foreign private schools.
Dubai may be run like a huge corporation.
But unlike a US multinational that delocalizes to
profit from cheap labor, Dubai imports cheap labor
in droves. The result is immigration without
citizenship - a model that fascinates assorted
American neo-cons and neo-liberal right-wingers,
with the added bonus that unlike Mexicans and
Central Americans in the US, immigrants to Dubai
totally renounce their political rights on the
altar of economic improvement. Neo-liberals refer
to Dubai as proof that Islam is not incompatible
with globalization.
It's fair to argue
what distinguishes a citizen from a non-citizen in
a state where there's no democracy at all. The
power of Dubai's absolute ruler, Sheikh Mohammed
bin Rashid al-Maktoum, could be defined as Genghis
Khan-like. But if you're an immigrant coming from
Iran's theocratic nationalism, India's
bureaucratic nightmare or Pakistan's barely
disguised dictatorship, the last thing you'll want
is an interventionist state. So Deng Xiaoping's
dictum - "to get rich is glorious" - ultimately
prevails. Lee Kwan Yew applied it in Singapore -
and it worked marvels.
Racism in Dubai -
as in the US south - is pervasive, but off-limits
to discussion, even as the fragile social pact
between citizens and foreign residents, which in
essence means "shut up and do your job", is
faltering. A 15% minority could not possibly
impose either its language or religion on a
cosmopolitan majority - especially when religion
is the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. Thus
(Western and Arab) men can get drunk in licensed
bars, pubs and restaurants and (Western only)
women can wear bikinis on the beach.
Every
night an army of multicultural girls - from
Southeast Asia, from behind the former Iron
Curtain, and elsewhere - officially staying in
Dubai as "kindergarten teachers" or "domestic
help" descend in miniskirts, halter tops and high
heels on the Cyclone nightclub and behave as if
they were in Bangkok's girlie bars. At the same
time some Internet sites are blocked "due to
incompatibility with the religious, cultural and
moral values of the United Arab Emirates". A
famous Dubai joke has a real-estate agent telling
a client to "buy a house in Jumeirah Beach. It's
the safest place to be. Half the bin Laden clan
lives there." Whatever its compromises, Dubai's
empirical globalization process always seem to
veer toward an optimum: a society of apolitical
consumers.
The new medievalism
Unelected male elders of a single ruling
family may control it with no opposition, Asians
may be treated as no more than slaves, and Dubai
remains in essence a protectorate - a status not
substantially different from the tribal sheikhdoms
dominated by the British until 1971. It's a
wonder; but the Emirates' medieval feudalism
somehow has managed to impress global perceptions
as the most "progressive" state in the Middle
East. Certainly that's not the perception of vast
swaths of the Arab and Muslim street - which view
the Gulf states en bloc as corrupt,
anti-Islamic and sold to hegemonic Anglo-American,
and not Arab and Muslim, economic and strategic
priorities.
From the point of view of
Pentagon hawks, this promontory advancing into the
Strait of Hormuz - through which transits every
day more than 40% of the world's oil - could not
but represent one of the key strategic nodes of
the global energy war. "Axis of evil" permanent
member Iran is on the other side of the Persian
Gulf. Any military scenario of an attack on Iran
includes a crucial US beachhead positioned in
Dubai and "protecting" the Gulf.
The
al-Qaeda factor For Salafi jihadis, Dubai
may be worse than Sodom and Gomorrah put together.
An al-Qaeda attack in Dubai would instantly turn
the overbuilding capitalist frenzy into ashes. So
why does it not happen? First and foremost because
al-Qaeda and assorted Salafi jihadi funds still
transit through Dubai.
Money-laundering in
the financial mecca of the Persian Gulf has been
virtually uncontrollable. The US government's case
against Zacarias Moussaoui documented how money to
finance the attacks of September 11, 2001, was
laundered through the UAE. During the mid- to late
1990s, the air path from the UAE to Kandahar was
crammed with private jets taking Arab notables on
falcon-hunting trips in Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan. Frequent fliers included UAE and
Saudi rulers - the UAE and Saudi Arabia, along
with Pakistan, were the only countries that
recognized and maintained normal relations with
the Taliban regime. Return flights laundered
Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.
During
the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, Dubai
was neutral. Thus no al-Qaeda attacks. But in
March 2005 al-Qaeda finally struck - but in Doha,
in neighboring Qatar, home of a massive US air
base, a Central Intelligence Agency base and an
array of US Special Forces living in secluded
compounds.
Bahrain houses the US fleet,
but US warships are constantly in Dubai. A
previous audio message by Saleh al-Aoofi, an
al-Qaeda leader in the Gulf, had been explicit:
"To the brothers of Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the
Emirates and to all the lions of jihad in the
countries neighboring Iraq, every one of us has to
attack what is available in his country of
soldiers, vehicles and air bases of the crusaders
and the oil allocated for them." Nevertheless, an
al-Qaeda attack on Dubai remains unlikely.
The relationship between the Emirates and
Iran is even more nuanced. During the Iran-Iraq
War (1980-88), the UAE supported Saddam Hussein.
Later on, when president Aakbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
and then Mohammad Khatami were in power in Iran,
there was a certain detente. Now the UAE - awash
in billions of dollars of expatriate Iranian cash
- fears Iran's messianic President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad. Arab countries including the UAE are
very concerned about Iran's nuclear program, which
includes the Bushehr nuclear plant right on the
other side of the Persian Gulf. Rashid Abdullah,
the UAE's foreign minister, points out that Dubai
is closer to Bushehr than Tehran - and would not
be spared the ghastly consequences of a nuclear
disaster (or a US attack).
Thus the Gulf
Cooperation Council countries - Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the Emirates -
appealed late last year for a "denuclearized"
Middle East, including both Iran and Israel. Not
surprisingly, neither has committed to the idea.
A wall of cash The combination
of the post-September 11 "war on terror" world
plus oil at US$70-plus a barrel has translated
into an unmitigated business bonanza for Dubai.
According to data by HSBC, since 2002, Gulf states
have been deluged with more than $300 billion in
excess cash. HSBC says that the so-called "Gulf
liquidity" is fueling, among others, booms on both
the Egyptian and Turkish stock markets and in the
Lebanese property market and is supporting Western
equity markets and the US national debt. Unlike
the 1970s, when petrodollars ended up in
Anglo-American banks, now this wall of cash has
translated into foreign direct investment (FDI).
If only Dubai realized that $300 billion would buy
the entire outstanding debt of the developing
world.
The Emirates is the world's No 6
oil exporter, behind Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway,
Iran and Venezuela, with an average export of 2.4
million barrels a day, At least in Dubai, it's
easy to spot where the money is going (apart from
the overbuilding frenzy); for instance, to
building up an aerospace industry, relieving its
dependence on the US; and to targeting more
foreign contracts for its airport management
business. And there are plenty more options for
"Gulf liquidity" to choose from in case problems
arise with the US, as in the recent P&O
controversy. The Germans want to build a
high-speed train network parallel to the Gulf
coast, and German arms dealers want to sell new
communication systems, missile defense systems and
submarines.
Crucial questions always come
back to the fore. How come descendants of Bedouins
and pearl divers have become high-tech
uber-capitalists - the Asian tigers of the Persian
Gulf - while the bulk of the Arab world has
stagnated politically and economically? Could this
economic boom be replicated in North Africa or in
an Arab world - Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia -
hostage to petrified social structures and
disconnected political leaders? And what if the
Pentagon had not messed up so ignominiously and
Iraq, with the help of qualified Iraqis (no need
to import cheap labor), could fashion a country,
swimming in oil revenues, even more dynamic (and
certainly more democratic) than the UAE?
Meet the CEO Sheikh Mohammed
bin Rashid al-Maktoum is the de facto chief
executive officer of Dubai. Rumor has it that he's
not exactly fluent in reading and writing his
native Arabic because he did not finish school. He
only acceded to power last January after the death
of his elder brother, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid
al-Maktoum. But he is widely credited by every
"national" as the man with the vision to build, in
the words of a businessman, "the first modern Arab
metropolis in history".
As far as the Arab
world is concerned, General Maktoum (he's also the
UAE's minister of defense) has certainly been wise
enough to warn his neighbors to clean up their
act. He was not referring to George W Bush's now
defunct (see the Iraq quagmire) "Greater Middle
East" enterprise, but to urgent economic and
social liberalization.
The UAE obviously
has a crucial asset that escapes, for instance,
both Syria and Egypt: oil. But the key point in
the overall strategy was to liberate the Emirates
from oil dependency and diversify the economy (a
lesson for Saudi Arabia). Oil production in the
UAE has fallen by more than 30% since 1998; but at
the same time revenues from oil and gas exports
are now only 37% of the budget. Dubai will run out
of oil by 2025; the UAE as a whole only by the end
of the century. The "diversification" may have
been one-sided so far - it revolves around
tourism, real estate and commercial projects. But
it has worked.
To see the flesh and bones
of globalization exposed, it just takes a drive
toward the western border of Dubai, site of the
largest man-made harbor in the world, a monstrous,
7-million-containers-a-year, 24/7 operation even
when, as next month, the average temperature is an
unbearable 50 degrees Celsius, humidity is 90% and
seawater is 38 degrees. Just on the other side of
the harbor are the US carrier battle groups that
usually stop by, the vigilantes of the Persian
Gulf. The whole port system belongs to - who else
- the ruling al-Maktoum family, who devised the
master plan to make Dubai a worthy rival of both
Singapore and Hong Kong. Dubai Ports now operates
harbors in China, Hong Kong, Australia, South
Korea, India, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia,
Romania, Germany and Latin America, and is itching
to take over the harbors of southern Iraq.
So Dubai is not really a city-state: it's
a family business (only five families control the
whole UAE). It's a bit like Singapore - or even
better, a fact confirmed after a recent visit by
Singapore's resident Confucius and founding father
Lee Kwan Yew. Behind CEO Sheikh Maktoum are three
technocrats responsible for what is called Project
Dubai. The trio have their offices in the sleek
Emirates Towers - constantly voted the best
business hotel in the Middle East.
Mohammed al-Abbar is the head of Emaar -
an enormous real-estate corporation with business
interests throughout the Arab world. Abbar was a
keen student of the Singaporean model. He's the
man who translated Singapore to the Gulf.
Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem manages the
Nakheel construction conglomerate. Nakheel
develops humongous, wow-factor-targeted projects
such as the artifical Palm Islands and the
artificial archipelago known as "The World" - the
epitome of the global gated-condo craze.
Mohammed al-Gergawi is the political mind
of the al-Maktoum family. He is the man in charge
of strategic long-term projects - such as the
positioning of Dubai as a major global banking and
service center, media hub and leading center for
medicine.
The way things get done in Dubai
could be interpreted in the absolute majority of
the bureaucratic-afflicted developing world as
nothing short of a miracle. Usually there's an
invitation. Then the next day a cluster of
businessmen gets together - at the Emirates
Towers. A sleek presentation then details the next
megaproject - be it the new, expanded
mega-airport, the world's tallest skyscraper, the
largest artificial island, a new mega-mall. Dubai
gets down to it, and sooner than anyone can count
how many cranes are working at the site, the
project is completed. One wonders what Osama bin
Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri could learn from these
business meetings at the Emirates Towers.
Imagine if Iraq was like
this Spectacular, head-spinning
announcements, spiced by suggestive rhetoric
("history rising", "a legend in the making") are
Dubai's stock in trade - only natural when one in
every five cranes in the world is busy working
24/7 in the city-state. It's a positively
Shanghainese overbuilding frenzy. When one flies
in from Tehran or, with a detour in Amman, from
Iraq, the contrast is absolutely breathtaking.
Along a Persian Gulf strip of less than 40
kilometers, there is at least $100 billion
invested in projects already ongoing or planned
for the short term; that's almost twice the FDI in
China.
In early May, for instance, Dubai
World Central was unveiled: the biggest airport in
the world (equal to the combined capacity of
Chicago's O'Hare and London's Heathrow),
surrounded by an entirely new city for 750,000
people, in an area of 140 square kilometers, at a
cost of $33 billion, financed by the government,
and located in the free-trade zone of Jebel Ali.
And this came on top of the current
expansion of Dubai International Airport, "the
largest airport development project under way in
the world", scheduled for completion next year,
with as many as 18,000 people working onsite, and
including five gates to handle the new mega-Airbus
A380 exclusively. Dubai International will be
linked to World Central by an express train.
Then there's the announcement of a $27
billion tourist complex, including the biggest
hotel in the world (wasn't that supposed to be The
Venetian in Las Vegas? Not anymore).
The
$800 million Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower) is going up
at a dizzying pace and should be completed in
2008. The height is officially secret, but it
should be something like 484 meters, including the
word's first rooftop spa. The tallest commercial
tower in the world, designed by Japanese and
Singaporean architects, will then knock out
Taipei's Tower 101. Apartments and offices are
sold out - although that does not mean much in
Dubai, because speculation is endemic. Around Burj
Dubai is mushrooming the inevitable,
work-in-progress, multi-skyscraper
mega-development called Business Bay.
The
artificial islands shaped like palm trees off the
Dubai coast have already become a pop icon from
Beirut to Bangkok. Four major islands are
springing up - with Palm Island Jumeirah already
advanced, along with Palm Island Jebel Ali, Palm
Island Deira and the overambitious, $3 billion The
World - no fewer than 300 artificial islands made
of sand dredged from the sea floor and designed to
look like, what else, the world map. Builder
Nakheel assures that most of the islands are sold
to "local money", and the rest to Americans and
Brits. By 2015, the company says, there will be
250,000 people living in The World, which will
look "like Venice".
As for the original
Palm at Jumeirah, it was conceived by none other
than Sheikh Maktoum; according to Jacqui
Josephson, "tourism and VIP delegations executive"
at Nakheel, "he wanted to put Dubai on the map
with something really sensational".
Hotel
developer Sol Kerzner is building a fake lost city
of Atlantis. Fake scuba-diving sites - Maldives,
the Barrier Reef, the Caymans, the Red Sea - are
also part of the package. Seven thousand South
Asians work on one of the Palms: instead of
causing what would be a perennial traffic jam,
every day they are ferried from further along the
coast. In another one of the Palms there will be
houses on stilts that, seen from above, will spell
out a poem written by - who else - the sheikh:
"Heed the wisdom of the wise: It takes a man of
vision to write on water. Not everyone who rides a
horse is a jockey. Great men rise to great
challenges."
Five years ago, Dubai's
Internet City was literally desert sand. Today it
is the Middle East headquarters of every major
global information-technology (IT) company. A
massive fish tank for Dubai Mall is using the
biggest piece of acrylic ever created, which is
going to take nothing less than a year's supply of
the world's acrylic.
For the multinational
shop-till-you-drop brigades, the Mall of the
Emirates bills itself as the largest outside the
United States, and the third-largest in the world
- and that includes the only artificial ski resort
in the whole Middle East (it looks like a freak,
twisted steel tube standing out in the Dubai
skyline). At the monster Souk Madinat Jumeirah,
everything is fake - it's a fake souk
inside a fake medina with its own five-star
hotels and apartments crisscrossed by fake water
channels.
Ibn Battuta - the legendary
Muslim navigator - died and was reborn as a mall,
complete with a fake Ibn Battuta medieval sailing
ship and "Chinese", "Indian", "Persian" or
"Moroccan" halls. The Giorgio Armani Hotel and the
Palazzo Versace are coming. And so is a $500
million underwater hotel, a Chess City (32 tower
blocks of 64 floors, each in the form of a chess
piece), an apartment tower shaped like Big Ben, an
Aviation City with its Cargo Village, an Aid
City-cum-Humanitarian Free Zone, an Exhibition
City, a Festival City, a Healthcare City, a Flower
City ...
There's also Dubailand - the $4.5
billion Arab Disneyland, which will be bigger than
Monaco, providing jobs for thousands of people.
There's the new urban railway with 37 stops. The
$1.7 billion Silicon Oasis for the IT giants
(Internet City is now passe?). And the $6 billion
Dubai Waterfront/Arabian Canal, bigger than
Barbados.
No wonder the ultimate
psychedelic night drive in Dubai is to glide along
the ghosts of giant buildings buried in the desert
sand, all surrounded by a mass of scaffolding and
overhung by giant tower cranes; it's like watching
a glowing, larger than-life, steel-and-glass
equivalent of the buried terra-cotta army of
Emperor Qin in Xian.
Meet the
slaves The social pyramid in Dubai is
unforgiving. At the base is the average
construction worker, inevitably South Asian,
either Pakistani or Indian. He's invisible. But he
and his fellow workers now comprise an astonishing
80% of the UAE's population. Human Rights Watch
has repeatedly complained that this archetypal
construction worker is never treated like a human
being. But the UAE power structure couldn't care
less.
He works a minimum of 12 hours a day
in up to 50 degrees, with a half-hour break, six
days a week, and earns no more than $150 a month.
He lives in a camp, four and sometimes as many as
12 to a 15-square-meter room lost in the dreary
al-Quoz industrial suburb. On his day off,
exhausted, he watches Bollywood video discs and
catches up with news from home in the Deira
souk. One night at the Emirates Towers (in
a standard room) would consume five months of his
salary. He can only come back home to see his
family - which gets an average of 50% of his
monthly salary - once every two years. If he's
really lucky - or an elderly expat, a former
skilled worker - he may eke out a comfortable
living as a taxi driver.
He has no rights.
Trade unions are banned. If he speaks up, he's
instantly deported. Or, in desperation, he may
follow the path of thousands who escaped to
massive slums crammed with illegal immigrants in
neighboring Sharjah. If she's a woman and works as
a maid or in a hotel, she can be sexually harassed
- and there will be no recourse.
Dozens of
construction workers died in 2005. Most of these
Spidermen of the Gulf simply fell from the huge
new towers, as slings and ropes are not exactly
high-tech. A worker died of suffocation in Palm
Jumeirah, where the local press discovered that
many were being fed half a lemon a day working in
45-degree heat. An array of dodgy companies is
addicted to delaying payment of salaries - or not
paying at all - as well as confiscating passports.
Slightly better off than the South Asians
are the Filipinos, some other Southeast Asians and
some Eastern Europeans serving - or playing - in
bars, restaurants, hotels, the whole tourist,
fun-in-the-sun industry.
Well-paid (and
white) Westerners - more than 100,000 - live
lavishly as engineers, surveyors, managers,
analysts, teachers. The overwhelming majority are
Anglos - British, Irish, South Africans,
Australians. Every major Western and Japanese IT
and audio-video giant, as well as every major
financial-services company, is based in Dubai.
But there are many constraints even for
the well off. If you are a non-UAE national, you
can only buy land in designated "free zones".
Foreign companies can only operate by paying a UAE
kafeel (sponsor, guarantor) to be their
local representative (it is a kafeel who
also monopolizes the "import" of foreign workers).
Only UAE nationals can work for the government.
And education and health care are free only for
UAE nationals - certainly not for the South
Asians.
Finally, at the top of the pyramid
is the al-Maktoum family and its associates,
controlling and investing the well of cash derived
from oil, exercising total political and social
control and building the futuristic version of
Arabia based on trade and finance.
Dreamland Everyone knows there's
a property-market bubble and the stock market is
bound to fall. The Dubai dream of gated
condo/mega-mall/golf course/designer food,
preferably on an artificial island, may not be
exactly Arabian Nights material. In March
there was a 48-hour strike by 2,500 workers at -
of all places - Burj Dubai, the tallest tower in
the world. The petrodollar dream remains attached
to the absence of rights to most people building
the dream. Without these "invisibles", the dream
would disappear like a mirage - as if all the oil
wells turned dry.
Sheikh Zayed's and
Sheikh Maktoum's dream of modern Arabia will
nonetheless continue to entice (quagmire Iraq is
not exactly an alternative), confirming the image
of an apolitical, consumer-mad, citizenship-free
society. It's as if Dubai's ruling family had
taken to heart the words of the late, great
Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer: "Just as
politics cannot be separated from life, life
cannot be separated from politics. People who
consider themselves to be non-political are no
different; they've already been assimilated by the
dominant political culture - they just don't feel
it any more."
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