The Dark Side of Dubai

British journalist Johann Hari goes to the desert kingdom and finds a sea of disturbing stories:

There are three different Dubais, 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. 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.

More here (and some videos: one, two, three). For this article, Hari was banned from Dubai and his writing blocked from access there.

Comments

[yayaver]

Dubai or any Arabia city are slums of 21st century. Concrete buildings and inhumane Sheikhs..

[yayaver]

There is a place called Saudi Arabia, worse than Dubai. You will get to know more dark side of Arab world after reading this weblog.

http://muttawa.blogspot.com/

Muttawa means Religious Policeman in crude language. The Religious Policeman is a weblog written by an anonymous blogger describing himself as a Saudi Arabian man, and writing under the pseudonym of Alhamedi Alanezi.

[Usha]

Thanks for posting the link, yayaver. It's a great find of a blog; the guy is a great writer with a perspective on Saudi Arabia that we don't commonly get to hear in the wider press.