Slumdogs and millionaires

Thanks to the Facebook network, I've discovered an article on the Independent website about The Dark Side of Dubai. Apart from the fact that I've never seen large photographs of Shaikh Mohammed plastered on buildings in Dubai, the report looks into issues that I've thought about every now and then, but about which I've not found concrete facts. After reading the articles and associated threads, I realised that there was a Panorama programme devoted to the underside of Dubai on TV recently. Unfortunately, I can't watch it online as I'm not in the UK. What is true is that there are thousands of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and here in Al Ain, who are scraping a living by working long hours in dangerous conditions. Their reward for their hard labour is a small salary and a bed in what is called a labour camp here. As the article says, these labour camps have minimal services with several people sharing beds and other basic items that we all take for granted. In the past, I hadn't understood why the term slavery has been used about the labourers and maids (the maids come here from Indonesia and Sri Lanka and many are treated as sub-humans). What I didn't know was that their passports are retained by their employers and that very often they are paying for a work visa and need to earn enough money to do that. I can't begin to think how awful it would be to have no passport and insufficient money in the bank to pay for a ticket home if I needed to. Regular readers will remember my panic when my passport was confiscated by an official at Dubai Airport when I first arrived in 2007. It was out of my hands for just a week, but it wasn't a good feeling to feel trapped here.

The Dubai phenomenon is a regular topic of ex-pat conversation. The city has been built by an army of underpaid labourers and there have been a number of deaths - people falling off buildings, crushed by building rubble, etc. The penile Burj Dubai, intended to be the tallest building in the world, is an obscene aberration on what was a sophisticated skyline, built at the cost of several lives. It looks like a runner bean on steroids and jars against what was a sophisticated skyline. Was it worth it?