Hello Dubai

by Joe Bennett

  Officially, the British stayed out of the whole dispute. Unofficially they backed the Al Maktoums. The last thing they wanted in one of their protectorates was any form of democracy.

  When he finally came to power nineteen years later, Rashid immediately demonstrated the deft political nous that was to serve him well during his long reign. He established a majlis. The only difference between this majlis and the one proposed in 1939 was that the new one had no authority. Its every decision had to be ratified by the ruler. In other words the Al Maktoums were prepared to compromise on anything except their own supreme power.

  Rashid’s accession coincided with Dubai’s oil coming on stream. Without that oil he might have been dog tucker. With it he was able to appease the dissenters. He gave the most lucrative concessions to his biggest enemies. Within a year or two everyone had by and large forgotten about politics and was busy making money.

  But in sharp contrast to most of the other oil sheikhs round the Middle East Rashid saw beyond oil. He realized that Dubai’s reserves were modest and finite. So he used the revenues to build the infrastructure that Dubai needed in order to thrive in other ways. When the oil money was insufficient, he borrowed. People cautioned him against it. He forged ahead. He created a city that could trade.

  His first mission was to build a deep-water port. Many thought there was no need for one. Planners advised him to build no more than four berths. Rashid insisted on sixteen. Within a couple of years, sixteen proved too few. He built twenty more berths. Then he set about building a new port altogether, Port Jebel Ali, the biggest in the Gulf. It boomed immediately.

  Rashid built dry docks too, and roads and bridges. He drilled for fresh water. He told his son to build an airport. When BOAC hesitated to fly there he personally bought all the seats available to ensure it was profitable for them. Rashid made things happen.

  Just about everything that has allowed Dubai to boom, from free zones to tourism, was instituted during the rule of Rashid. And the boss in the World Trade Centre watched it all happen. For people like him on the comfortable side of the transformation it must have been an exciting few decades.

  When I ask the boss whether the bubble will burst, he laughs. Dubai, he says, is here to stay. It has too many advantages to implode, too much investment has been made. It has location, political stability, climate, tolerance and a head start on everyone else. The sand will never reclaim it. ‘Come back in a year and you’ll see that I’m right,’ he says, and shakes my hand, and I leave him at his empty desk, fiddling with his gold pen, beside the telephone that hasn’t rung in the hour I’ve been there.

  Lifts are among the world’s most socially awkward places. The people inside have nothing in common except a desire to escape. They are standing unnaturally close to each other. Their most primitive sense is screaming that they should not allow strangers this near. Their sense of social rules is crying out for acknowledgement of each other. In no other circumstances do they stand like this except in crowds at spectacles. And at spectacles there is somewhere to look. In lifts there is nowhere. Most people resolve the problem by staring at the panel above the door that indicates the passage of floors. They silently urge it to hurry up.

  When the lift doors open for me on the thirtieth floor of the World Trade Centre they reveal a man on his own. He looks me smack in the eye and smiles.

  ‘How do you do?’ he says. He’s fortyish, wearing a costly looking suit and a white shirt open at the neck. He has something of Tiger Woods about him, or of Barack Obama, a sleek, tall frame and multi-racial provenance.

  ‘Hello,’ I say and step in. He offers his hand.

  This could be creepy. It feels the opposite. The man is charming. His unforced courtesy melts my unease. By the time we reach the ground level, which has involved a change of lifts at the nineteenth floor, he knows more about me than anyone else in Dubai does and I know that he works in private equity – which I think means shopping on a grand scale – and that he’s off to attend a meeting at the Marina.

  ‘Have you seen the Marina, Joe?’

  I haven’t.

  ‘Come along if you like, I’m early. We’ll have coffee.’

  His name, if I heard him correctly, is Varood. The son of an African father and an Indian mother, Varood and his family left Uganda in the early Seventies when Idi Amin expelled all Asians. Because of his father’s nationality they could have stayed, but his mother was terrified of the violence that Amin encouraged and exploited. Though Varood was only young he can still recall his mother’s fear. The family went to England for a while, then the States.

  I tell him I remember Idi Amin being in the news when I was a teenager. He seemed a comic figure.

  ‘Mad and murderous,’ says Varood. ‘Illiterate too.’

  Amin died only a few years ago in the country to which he’d fled when deposed. ‘Guess where that was,’ says Varood.

  I shrug.

  ‘Saudi,’ he says, and laughs. ‘Saudi bloody Arabia.’

  And I am struck once again by the gulf between events and reported events. Every international story titillates for a few days and then subsides. But for those who live through it, it can remain the only story, the cause of distress or poverty that scars a life. Never, in fifty years, has such an event affected me. I have lived a life of ease more or less unparalleled in human history. A part of me retrospectively envies Varood.

  ‘Amin did me a favour,’ he says as if reading my mind, and smiles broadly across the back seat of the taxi. ‘He got me out of bloody Africa.’

  We’re on Sheikh Zayed Road, spearing through the tower-block forest. Even if I were to press my nose against the window of the taxi and twist my neck I would be unable to see sky. This is a landscape as unrelievedly urban as Manhattan.

  Varood’s been in Dubai for several years. The private equity company he works for is one that I will have heard of, he says, but he politely declines to name it. It is based in the States but it has offices in many cities. He enjoys Dubai.

  ‘It’s like Singapore,’ he says, ‘only better. It’s exciting. It hasn’t had time to get set in its ways. People come here to make things happen. Everyone just gets on with things so there’s no real class system. You’re judged only on your success.’

  ‘And will it last? Isn’t it cracking under the strain?’

  ‘It’ll last. There are lots of people who hate Dubai and who want it to fail. They call it a nouveau riche upstart, a brash and shallow thing, because they resent its success. But in reality they’re just scared that Dubai’s winning and they’re losing; that they’re being left behind. And isn’t that always the way? Dubai’s no different really from anywhere else. It exists to make money and it’s here to stay. Cities don’t disappear, do they? Mind you, even if it does crash and burn, it’s been one hell of a ride.’ And he laughs with wonderful African teeth.

  The Marina is an artificial creek, a huge inlet carved into the land. Apartment blocks are rising all around it. This has been planned as another playground for the wealthy. But at the cafe on the curving concrete boulevard, Varood and I are the only customers. Indeed we are pretty well the only people about.

  Impressively, our coffees still take fifteen minutes to arrive. The waiter doesn’t apologize.

  ‘That’s Internet City over there,’ says Varood, pointing at a forest of skyscrapers glistening in winter sun. ‘You know about the cities, Joe?’

  I do, sort of, but I am happy to hear Varood explain them. They’ve been integral to the boom of Dubai.

  When the UAE was formed it passed a law requiring all companies that traded within its territory to be majority-owned by local Emiratis. The obvious purpose of the law was to ward off the danger of a foreign influx and potential loss of sovereignty. Foreign businesses duly found the law off-putting, as they were supposed to do. But so did Sheikh Rashid of Dubai. It prevented him attracting the sort of businesses he felt he needed to make his city less dependent on oil.

  ‘So he simply ign
ored the law,’ says Varood.

  Rashid unilaterally established free zones for international business where the local law didn’t apply. He gave these zones names like Media City, Internet City, Healthcare City and so on, but they were essentially just little islands of Dubai that stood apart from the requirements of the rest of the UAE, like the enclaves that European powers established in Shanghai in the early twentieth century.

  The move made Dubai understandably unpopular with the other emirates and just as understandably popular with foreign corporations. Here was an untaxed and largely unregulated place from which to do business. And most importantly it was smack in the middle of the Middle East, a huge market that they had always found hard to tap because of its religious difference and its political instability. In consequence, they flocked to Dubai. And now all the other emirates are trying to do the same thing.

  Varood comes close to enshrining the modern face of Dubai. He’s an unapologetic capitalist. He’s made good from not much. He’s ambitious, contemporary, groomed, healthy and effectively stateless. He’s a brew of diverse races. He’s at home in almost any culture. He is globalization made flesh.

  Globalization is the new form of empire. Despite its name it is largely unconcerned with territory. Its unit of organisation is not the nation state but the corporation. It has been enabled by the jet plane and more recently by the internet. It originated in the States but has become a game played by all wealthy nations with the Americans still in the lead, but with countless others at their heels. It’s a game of money. For the winners the rewards are absurdly generous. For the losers, for the Filipina maids and Indian labourers, well, they were losing before they began. Nothing much changes for them.

  When, with his unfailing good manners, Varood apologizes and leaves to attend his meeting, I take a stroll along the edge of the Marina. A few yachts sit moored and motionless at the feet of apartment blocks, their hulls as white as the breast feathers of gulls. Half the buildings are still under construction. Cranes are bonded to their flanks by some process of engineering that I can only marvel at. They spike so high in the sky that looking up at them makes me sneeze. Their drivers must take half an hour to climb to them each morning. I presume they piss in the cab.

  A giant sheet of grey plastic sails down and across the sky like one of those Amazonian gliding squirrels, disappears behind a billboard saying ‘Damac. Luxury Delivered’, reappears the other side, then, as the breeze near ground level weakens, crumples to the water.

  Another billboard announces a forthcoming tower of ‘prestige residences’. At present it’s just a lattice of steel and concrete. What will become balconies for white-toothed, designer-dressed people to lounge on are just protruding slabs of concrete, like diving boards in the sky. On one of these diving boards, perhaps twenty floors up, a man is standing in blue overalls. There is no barrier between him and the world below. If he fell he would have several seconds to mull things over on his way to a splattered death. The crane swings a load of building materials in towards where he stands. He guides it in by hand leaning nonchalantly out over eternity.

  8

  Down in Deira

  ‘You have, like, a credit card,’ says the girl. She is maybe thirteen years old, dressed like Barbie, and is deep in conversation with another girl at a table over paper cups of Coca-Cola. Both girls have the vowels of an English private school and the intonation of Paris Hilton. Every sentence ends with the rising intonation known to students of linguistics as the imbecilic interrogative.

  ‘And your parents top the card up so you never like run out of money to buy anything.’

  ‘Cool.’

  The girls are in the foyer of the Hyatt Hotel. They’ve been ice-skating. Their skates protrude from bags at their feet. One bag is pink, the other Cambridge blue. The ice rink is inside the foyer, shaped like a kidney and currently being groomed by a machine like a ride-on mower.

  ‘Daddy took us sand boarding.’

  ‘Sand boarding, is that like, like, snow boarding?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is it good?’

  ‘Yeah it’s cool.’

  ‘Do you go like skiing in France?’

  The walls of the foyer are decorated with ads for authentic cuisine of several varieties to be found in the hotel’s restaurants and for a clinic that specializes in rhinoplasty. There are before and after pictures of nose jobs.

  Down by the sea on the Deira side of the Creek, the Hyatt is a brown and ugly monolith. Most of the thousand windows on its vast flank are sealed shut to retain the conditioned air, but the few that hang open give the building the look of a colossal advent calendar. The Indian car-park attendant has a hut and a uniform and is in charge of the inevitable barrier arm that sieves the right people from the wrong. In their short lives, the skating girls will rarely have found themselves on the wrong side of a barrier arm.

  Past the landscaped hummocks with their costly mats of grass, and across the highway and the intervening foreshore, I can see one of Dubai’s most ambitious projects. Or I would be able to, were it not blocked by wooden screens the size of houses.

  Palm Deira is the third and the largest of the Palms. The first of them, Palm Jumeirah, gained global publicity and sold out. Palm Jebel Ali looked like doing the same. So they launched into Palm Deira. And then the bubble burst. It is common knowledge that work on Palm Deira has stopped. But it is not official knowledge. It has never been publicly admitted.

  The developers are an outfit called Nakheel. Like most of the developers in Dubai, Nakheel is a quasi-governmental organization. Which is how, in Dubai, things get messy.

  Most of the major Dubai organizations – the developers and contractors, the phone companies, the water companies – are headed by people close to the ruling family. And they operate under rules different to the ones I’m familiar with as a westerner from an ostensibly transparent democracy. The rules here are by and large not written down and the last recourse is not to the law. It is to the ruler, who makes the law. The result is murk. Only the nationals on the inside know what’s going on.

  It doesn’t help that there is no free press to delve into what’s going on and report it openly. Many fine things are said about press freedom here but the plain fact is that awkward stuff goes unreported. The reasons are obvious. You don’t know how the authorities will react. Journalists fear imprisonment or revocation of the visa that permits them to stay in Dubai. And they want to stay in Dubai, because the going is good.

  Few journos are local. Most are expatriates who’ve exchanged the Burnley Chronicle and reporting on council meetings for nice weather, three times the salary, and no income tax. It is not in their interests to stir things up. Nor, more importantly, do they have a stake in the country that might rouse a selfless desire to stir things up. If Dubai implodes it won’t matter much to them. They’ll just bugger off. They, like almost everyone here, are mercenaries.

  The profusion of propaganda and the shortage of hard information leads to further murk, and the murk breeds rumour, and one of the rumours going about at the moment is that Nakheel is in big trouble. The rumour is almost certainly right. No one is working on Palm Deira any more, which is why it’s got screens in front of it. But the truth, though universally guessed, must be officially denied because it could damage the image of Dubai. It’s not vanity. It’s a business imperative.

  Dubai has sold itself to business as a politically stable oasis in the least politically stable region of the world, friendly to western ways, and unstoppably prosperous. The tactic has worked better than anyone could have hoped, but the same problem arises with business as with the ex-pat journalists. They too are purely mercenary. The corporations have come solely for selfish reasons. They have no stake in the place except their own advantage. They can leave almost as easily as they came. They don’t care about the place or its society or its future.

  As a result, anything that threatens to puncture belief in Dubai, such as the cessation of a major
project and the possible bankruptcy of a huge quasi-governmental developer, must be screened from view with house-sized sheets of plywood and nothing on the business pages. Because if belief deflates, businesses may leave. If one leaves, dozens could follow. If dozens, hundreds.

  I cross the road and find, to my surprise and delight, cricket. Lots of cricket, taking place on perhaps an acre of waste ground strewn with gravel and chunks of industrial rubble. It’s very bad cricket, but very intense cricket and very happy cricket, being played by Indians and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans, the labourers of Dubai. Today is their day off, Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, and they have come to town by bus from the camps they live in to play and to be. They are poor and young and they play cricket with a passion that makes me smile.

  At least a dozen games are going on. The stumps are breeze blocks or scraps of timber propped up with rocks. Each game has only one bat and a hairless tennis ball that makes a meaty high-pitched thwack when walloped. And how it is walloped. No one plays defensively. The block is unheard of. The only shot played is an enormous heave to the leg side, the cricketing equivalent of a haymaker, a bid to send the ball miles over mid-wicket. Because the pitches are so crammed together, you only know which fielders belong to which game when a batsman connects. The ball flies into the outfield and its presence ignites just one of the many available fielders, like a chemical signal prompting a particular synapse. The fielder scurries after the ball and biffs it back while his team-mates shout at him and the batting side shouts at the batsmen, and the batsmen scamper between the makeshift wickets wearing flip-flops or skimpy leather sandals or no shoes at all.