Dubai is home to a quarter of a million British people: dismayed by our high taxation, poor public services and rain, their numbers swell each year. One of the seven emirates of the UAE, Dubai is a polyglot city, a Babel. Ninety per cent of its residents are from elsewhere. The Gulf expert Christopher Davidson calls Dubai the “ultimate liberal economic city state” with “some of the best physical infrastructure in the region”. He adds: “For many years, it’s provided ongoing political stability, which in the Arab world, and especially the Gulf region, has been in great scarcity.” It has low taxation and cheap labour: that is its lure.
When I went to Dubai I found it disorientating, above all things — capitalism meets tyranny, and I can’t fathom anything worse. They have astounding things — the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building; the Palm Jumeirah, an artificial archipelago created in the shape of a palm tree — and this seems to blind credulous westerners to its reality. Dubai is a dictatorship under Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and he preserves his absolute power as dictators always do: with the repression of all potential threats.
A Human Rights Watch spokeswoman says Dubai has “a zero-tolerance policy towards dissent and no respect for basic freedoms”. There are “grave crimes committed against migrant workers, as well as an extremely abusive foreign policy”. The UAE finances brutal militia in Yemen and the Sudan.
After the abortive Arab Spring and its plea for greater representation, the sheikh imprisoned dissidents, many of them lawyers. Ahmed Mansoor “is arguably the UAE’s most well-known human rights defender,” she says, going on to explain: “Since March 2017 he’s been imprisoned in an isolation cell with barely more than a mat to sleep on. Ahmed is a close friend to many of my colleagues at HRW: he’s a current member of our advisory committee.”
Mansoor is famous within the Middle East for his human rights activism. “But no one really knows about his case anymore,” the spokeswoman says. That is the power of PR. Each week there is another fawning article about Dubai. Beyoncé sang there; Rio Ferdinand moved there. Westerners think it is “safe”, which is laughable.
What strikes Mustafa Qadri, founder and chief executive of the human and labour rights organisation Equidem, is “the relatively low threshold that you have to reach as a human being to effectively offend them [the authorities]”. The intelligence apparatus is very sophisticated, he says. Plug in your smartphone at the airport and your data might be hacked. “Everyone is being monitored in the Emirates,” he says.
He speaks about the threat to female domestic workers, “mostly women, mostly from Asia and Africa” because protections barely exist. “They’re seen as being, you know, less civilised: as being dirty.” Equidem has monitored members of the Emirati police force abusing their domestic workers — so, “imagine how other people are treating them”.
Then there are the construction workers shipped in from all over the global south to build Xanadu. He speaks now to the guileless tourist passing through Dubai: “And if you’ve ever been there during the hot times of the year, you may have seen, like tiny ants, these workers on these buildings which are high up. You can imagine the kind of risk that these workers face.” I can imagine it, but I live in Britain. It isn’t safe to be curious in Dubai.
The work is back-breaking. Thousands are dying without any adequate investigation as to how they’re dying
Working in extreme heat can cause organ failure, Qadri says. He has come across “so many cases” of workers falling to their deaths, or “losing a leg or an arm”. “The work is back-breaking,” he says. “Thousands are dying without any adequate investigation as to how they’re dying. Most of them are young men.”
I interview a young Pakistani man, who is working as a delivery driver. I cannot give you his name. We do it by text: he from a room he shares with eight people. “In our country there’s nothing,” he says, “that’s why people come to Arabic countries.”
He works 12 hours a day, six days a week. “If you refuse to work long hours the company will remove you because there’s lots of people waiting in line to join,” he says. His salary is 850 dirham (£175) per month. “Better than to go back to my country because there I can’t even make 850 dirham. That’s why the company is taking advantage of people like me … when you are sick, they force you to work.”
When I ask him what it is like in Dubai, he says: “No words, but still better than our own country. If you work hard, you will just survive. I will move from here whenever I get chance. No one comes to live here permanently.” And if you are rich? “If you are rich,” he says, “it is heaven.” I wouldn’t say that: heaven houses the good. Rather, Dubai is the island of the lotus eaters; of the morally defunct.
I speak to one such: a white woman who has lived in Dubai for two decades. She says the education and medical systems are the best in the world — if you can afford them. She has an Indian live-in “helper” six days a week, who has put her four children through university in India with her wages. “She’s been able to do far better working here for us, for her family, than she would have done had she stayed in India,” she says.
For this woman, the advantage of Dubai is that: “If the rulers want it done, they find someone to do it, and it gets done. So that makes it an extremely interesting place to live.” Well, yes, if you are a member of the privileged class. “I feel like almost anything I need or want here, I could probably find someone to do it for me,” she says.
I think of the notorious prostitution rings of Dubai: of girls who fall out of windows; or girls who are raped but do not tell the police, because they might be arrested; of the criminalisation of homosexuality; of women separated from their children because their husbands demand it, as the activist Aisha Ali-Khan told me.
“We believe democracy is the right way because we have chosen in our respective countries to run things that way,” the woman says. “But we have a ruling family that are making sure everybody’s looked after and all the infrastructure is in place. Why do we need a democracy? The ruling family here are doing amazing things to make sure all of us have a much better life. They’re very enlightened and they’re very welcoming and they’re very warm. I get to use the roads, pay taxes. Those roads are built by the ruling family. What’s not to like about that?”
And here is the nub of it: “I have a significantly better standard of living I can’t have anywhere else. I love the city. I love the way it’s growing. I love the direction it’s going in. I love how welcome I feel. I love the education my kids are getting. I love the healthcare I’m getting. I love the money I’m saving and I love the lifestyle.”
Younger people are a little less enchanted — but they don’t need the childcare. One British girl who spent her teenage years in Dubai told me: “As quite an opinionated teenager, I often struggled with some of Dubai’s values and the realities of life there — stark wage gaps based on nationality, open discrimination and a lack of free speech or space for philosophical or political discussion. Even with my own preconceptions, it surprised me.”
There were no real parks or green spaces, just plastic grass and artificial snow in a desert
And the hypocrisy! “I was only 12,” she says, “yet our weekends involved drinking at beach clubs, house parties on compounds and even hanging out with footballers who had no idea how young we were. It was ridiculously easy to get alcohol, literally through a WhatsApp number.” In retrospect, she says, “a lot of it felt really superficial — like the epitome of materialism. There were no real parks or green spaces, just plastic grass and artificial snow in a desert. It might have looked impressive from the outside, but it often felt hollow.”
Another British woman, a journalist, “had one pretty terrible experience”. Her Emirati landlord, “unbeknown to me had spuriously made up the fact that I owed him six months’ rent”. She was tried in absentia, arrested and taken to court. “Obviously, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. You must pay to make the problem go away.” But that is the music of Dubai. “It’s always in the background: that you could have the rug swept from under your feet,” she says.
The writer Momtaza Mehri first visited Dubai as a child, when it was “a much quieter, much more subdued place”. This was before the “breakneck luxury and ostentatious displays of wealth”. Mehri is British Somali, and she found herself among “the South Asian population, the Sudanese population, the Arab population from various parts of the Arab world”. It was not, she says, “astronomically different from the kind of communities that you would be part of in the UK, in a city like London, and where I’m from, in Kilburn”.
Everyone was “a citizen of elsewhere. They came here for employment. They kept their traditions. They spoke their languages.” This is south to south migration: “Very interesting and tangible … it’s the closest to the Philippines that I’ve ever been. It’s the closest to south India that I’ve ever been, in terms of the presence of the food, the language, the people, and how intact it feels. And that’s a Dubai I know. There are so many webs of exploitation.”
“Dubai unsettles me because it really feels like you’re approaching the world from a different centre,” she says. “You really feel like you’re at the edge of a different kind of modernity.” Mehri has a gift: she makes Dubai sound like the most interesting city in the world. “And that has a dark side to it,” she says. “Because people now aspire to be like a Dubai, and there’s so much that we shouldn’t be copying from Dubai.”
Dubai by numbers
240k Estimated number of British expats living in Dubai
5,000 British companies operating in the UAE, including BP, Rolls-Royce, HSBC and Waitrose
90% Estimated expatriate population of Dubai, with the largest group coming from India
20.6% How much lower consumer prices are in Dubai compared with London
$100k Price to stay for one night in the Royal Mansion Suite at Atlantis The Royal in Dubai
£175k Monthly pay for delivery driver interviewed in our piece, working 12 hours a day, six days a week
I speak to Hamad al-Shamsi, an Emirati dissident and human rights activist. He was accused of crimes against national security in 2013, is considered a terrorist and lives in exile in Turkey. “When it comes to the human rights, to freedom of expression, to civic society — they do not exist at all,” he says. “This is my country. I love it, but I cannot have the freedom that I have outside.”
He left Dubai in 2012 and last saw his mother seven years ago. “My mother is on a travel ban because of me,” he says. “My mother is almost 80 years old. Almost all my brothers and sisters are on travel ban because they [the authorities] want me to come back.
“My father-in-law and my mother-in-law are also on a travel ban. My wife has nothing to do with this. The family of my wife don’t have any political activist role at all. So, this is collective punishment. It is not only my family. A lot of people suffer from the same thing.”
Most Emiratis prefer to stay silent, because saying the wrong thing can lead to arrest or exile
I ask him what tyranny has done to the diffident Emiratis. “It’s actually hard to know what Emiratis really think about their government because most people are afraid to speak openly,” he says. “The local media is fully controlled by the state, and any criticism is immediately labelled as hate or hostility toward the UAE, even when it comes from people who genuinely care about the country. Most Emiratis prefer to stay silent or only talk about comfort and prosperity, because saying the wrong thing can lead to arrest or exile. That’s the reality everyone there understands.”
It’s a truism: in a tyranny you can’t know your own countrymen. Sometimes you can’t even know your own family. Dubai isn’t just a place, it’s a metaphor, and that is why it is so fascinating: what will we do for money, and what will it cost us in the end? Do the British people flooding it know that?
My fear is that we, in our rotting democracies, will become like Dubai, because to value this is to value tyranny, whatever name you give it, and there’s a word for that. Decadence: always the final age of empire.
Main image by HIT&RUN
