The astonishing hubris, questionable taste, and environmental naivete of the House of Maktoum

Dubai is right to try and secure itself an economic future after the oil runs out. The tragedy for this tiny Arab emirate is that it has chosen to go about things in such a blatantly unsustainable way.

As the emirate, with its 300,000 citizens, seeks to transform itself into a tax-free, hedonistic paradise that aims to out Vegas Las Vegas in brash vulgarity, it is riding roughshod over environmental and human rights concerns. It is also building up tremendous debts, which could yet come back to haunt it.

Strangely, however, this member of the seven-strong United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) seems to be off the radar screen for organisations such as the Environmental Investigation Agency, Worldwide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace. However, the environmental and other crimes that are being committed by and in Dubai — which was until the 1960s a relatively insignificant pearl fishing, smuggling and trading port  — merit further investigation.

I’m not going to list them all here. However there are questions about the damage being caused to the maritime environment by the archipelago of artificial islands — Palm Jumeirah, Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Deira, the World and the Universe — that are being built off Dubai’s coast. There are also questions over whether the islands will have a long-term future.

A few footballers have been persuaded to pay over the odds for seaside villas there and pop star Rod Stewart is reported to have shelled out £18 million for an island shaped like Great Britain. But since the artificial islands are built of compacted sand, experts predict they will sooner or later be washed away by the tides and marine currents of the Persian Gulf.

The Arab state, which alongside other U.A.E. states, gained its independence from Britain in 1971, is also constructing 11 new golf courses on top of the shifting sand dunes of its desert interior. Even if these are to be watered with treated sewage, it doesn’t strike me as the most sustainable form of tourism.

Justin Francis, co-founder of Responsibletravel.com, recently said: “Golf courses are being constructed in Dubai at breakneck speed. My biggest concern is the amount of water required. In general, a golf course needs about a million cubic metres of water per hectare per year – equivalent to the water consumption of a city of 12,000 inhabitants.”

One of the planned courses, “The Tiger Woods”, is being advertised in the current issue of The Economist. Designed by the eponymous golfing hero, the still uncompleted course and resort will be located in Dubailand, literally “a $10 billion theme park of theme parks” that is being built by Tatweer.

Once complete, Dubailand will supposedly employ tens of thousands of people and the emirate’s ruler, the horse-racing mad Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashind al-Maktoum, believes it will lure 15 million visitors per year to his ambitious small country. In addition to Tiger Woods’ golf course and resort, the theme park will have 44 other “world class” attractions.

These will include a replica of the Eiffel Tower, 20 metres taller than the Paris original. It will also house a Formula One racing track, a 66,000 capacity football stadium, a Manchester United soccer academy and a dinosaur park put together with the help of London’s Natural History Museum.

And if that isn’t going to be enough to keep tourists happy, there will also be replicas of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids, an indoor ski resort (despite Dubai’s average external temperatures of 49 degrees celsius), a centre for “extreme sports”, a Nubian village, the largest zoo in the Middle East, several new five-star hotels, a modern art gallery and the Mall of Arabia. The latter will be the world’s largest shopping mall, with an area of ten million square feet, according to Salam Bin Dasal, chief executive of Dubailand.

One of the more preposterous projects is to recreate the city of Lyons, dubbed Lyon-Dubai City, on a 400 hectare plot in the emirate, in exchange for which the Lyonnais have cleverly persuaded the ersatz town’s creators to hand over the sum of £685 million. Nice work if you can get it. This is a form of franchising deal that other European cities should latch onto while they can!

The emirate is also building a brand new airport modestly titled Dubai World Central International Airport that will be the world’s fourth-largest when completed in 2017. All this in a city whose actual population is smaller than Coventry’s.

Another development was confirmed last week. “The Donald”, the bouffant-haired tycoon Donald Trump, has hired contractors to build the modestly-titled Palm Trump International Hotel & Tower (see artist’s impression above). This development, billed as a focal point for the artificial island of Palm Jumeira, is currently scheduled for completion in 2011.

The 62-storey, 270-metre building will have a floor space of 250,000 square metres. With two towers merging into one and straddling the city’s monorail tracks, it resembles something out the 1970s television series The Thunderbirds.

Trump’s monstrosity is dwarfed by many of the other buildings, notably the Burj Dubai which is still being erected down the road. In puerile fashion, Sheikh Mo, as the country’s ruler is known to his friends, is determined that this should be the world’s tallest structure when finally completed. He is therefore keeping its final height under wraps.

The tower was originally scheduled to have had 160 storeys and a height of 636 metres (2,063 feet). Now scheduled for completion in September 2009, the Burj, otherwise known as the “Death Spire”, will probably have a few storeys added, just to ensure it’s the world’s tallest.

Dubai pursues apartheid-like policies

One of the most sickening things about Dubai for me — and one to which many of is white-collar expatriate workers seem to ignore — is that it owes much of its current economic success to an informal system of apartheid with parallels to that which existed in South Africa until 1993. Some people go as far as calling it slave labour.

The 700,000 foreign labourers who are building the emirate’s towers and other follies — most of whom have come from poor rural villages in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — are not even allowed to set foot in Dubai’s opulent malls, are not accorded full citizenship rights and have to work in appalling conditions for virtually no pay. For years, human rights groups have been complaining about their lot, but to little effect.

Some recent demonstrations by workers have turned violent. In mid-March 2008, police arrested 500 migrant workers from the Indian subcontinent who smashed office windows and set cars alight in neighbouring Sharjah, according to a report by the Associated Press (AP). Dubai officials were so embarrassed that they are reported to have promised reform.

Here I quote from Hamza Hendawi’s AP report dated 25 May 2008:

Many South Asian workers are essentially indentured servants, borrowing heavily to pay recruitment agents for jobs. They can spend several years paying back debts that can run $3,000 or more with wages ranging from $150 to $300 a month.

Lately, the labourers have earned less because of a weakened dollar — to which the Emirati dirham is tied — and Dubai’s double-digit inflation. They work six days or even six and a half, and 60-hour weeks.

Employers often confiscate the workers’ passports, in violation of Dubai law, and withhold pay for two or three months to stop workers from quitting. Many have no medical insurance and work outdoors in summer heat of 49˚C with stifling humidity.

Housing often means bare, crowded trailers surrounded by barbed wire or located on Dubai’s desert fringes. Some are not connected to water or sewage grids.

Overall, human rights groups say, unscrupulous employers and government indifference have combined to create one of the worst cases of systematic exploitation in today’s world.

Dubai and Emirati officials dismiss talk of a minimum wage as incompatible with Dubai’s market economy. But they insist they have taken steps to ensure regulations are followed at construction sites and living quarters.

“Our role is to make sure that what has been promised is what is actually paid,” said Alex Zalami, a senior adviser to the Emirates’ Labour Ministry. “The companies want to maximize profits. And what we do is teach them that productivity improves, if conditions improve for workers.”

Despite having ranked Dubai as the world’s least “green” country in May 2007, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) appears to have since gone soft on Dubai. The WWF’s earlier research, written by Jonathan Loh, found that, on a per capita basis, Dubai’s population is putting more of a strain on the global ecosystem than any other, giving the emirate the world’s largest per-capita “ecological footprint”.

However the WWF has toned down its language since getting into bed with the locally-run Emirates Wildlife Society (EWS). It ought to be ashamed of itself.

The terrible things that are going on in Dubai reminded me of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias. In this 1817 poem, Shelley tells of the discovery in the desert of a ruined statue of a Pharaoh who was laid low by his own hubristic ambition. The masterpiece includes the immortal lines:

My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

• For an in-depth examination of how the al-Maktoums are turning Dubai into a global icon of “imagineered urbanism” by the excellent Mike Davis, click here
• To read Building Towers, Cheating Workers, an 71-page in-depth report into human rights abuses in the United Arab Emirates, produced by Human Rights Watch, click here

This blog post was published on 23 June 2008