Dubai should be judged on its merits

By Mohammed Almezel, Deputy Managing Editor

Published: July 28, 2009, 23:08
For years, many of us who work in the press in the Arab world looked with envy at our
peers in the British media. They had the luxury to investigate and report on subjects we
were forced to ignore.

Some of us are still struggling in the local environment and writing to 'get the story out'
without angering anyone, rather than taking risks.

We tell our young journalists that we should not jeopardise our news organisation or
even get it closed down just because we want to act like British reporters do.

But things have changed dramatically in the past few years. The media in the Arab world
is increasingly vocal and can report quite freely provided they employ the 'necessary'
tricks (such as omitting the names of suspected criminals and underperforming schools
or hospitals - often we tend to use initials) on issues that were considered off limits a
few years ago.

We now report on corruption in politics and government, the dubious labour practices of
influential employers and can question decisions that we suspect could harm the public
interest.

One of the most robust presses in this part of the world can in fact be found in Dubai,
the second largest of seven emirates that make up the Gulf state of the UAE.

The amazing growth the emirate has witnessed in the past decade led to evolution and
competition in the media, the likes of which has never been seen before.

Reporters now go out in the field with the latest gadgets - small video cameras and
Blackberry mobile phones - and the story is online in minutes.

They rarely wait for a more cautious editor, like myself, to tell them that we cannot run
this or that. Once the story is online, no one can stop the flow of information. Dubai not
only understands this but also appreciates it.

Its success story was made possible by opening up to the new and the modern - not just
gadgets and expensive towers, but more importantly ideas and concepts.

We live in a conservative neighbourhood in the Gulf. But we managed to build a city that
is multicultural, open-minded, tolerant and as modern as you can get.

And that is not because of the luxuries we import from around the world. It is mainly
because we believe that the peaceful co-existence of different cultures and minds can do
wonders.

But there is a price to pay - occasionally we must suffer columnists like Rod Liddle
(admittedly, I would love to meet him).

The Times columnist spent a few days - or perhaps a few hours, he didn't say - in Dubai
and then wrote a 4,400 word essay about the emirate (The Sunday Times, July 12,
2009, "Sordid reality behind Dubai's gilded façade").

This vitriolic, racist rant was more worthy of a third-grade tabloid. It was not the
professional journalism one expects from an institution like The Times.
He mixed personal anecdotes with facts, so that by the time you finished reading his
article, you were confused as to which was which.

Dubai has been the subject of a number of such articles over the past few months,
mainly in British newspapers. They tend to portray a city that has fallen apart as a result
of the global economic crisis. One article described Dubai as 'a ghost city'.

But none of the other articles was as comical as the one written by Liddle. He narrated
the story of Dubai, a city that has attracted thousands of reputed multinational
companies and investors, through the eyes of prostitutes, a few disgruntled expatriates
and quoted an alleged angry message posted by an Emirati "recently" on a blog.

Of course, since Liddle kept his source anonymous, we have no way of knowing which
blog he was quoting, and cannot identify the person who posted this possibly fake
message.

Dubai is not perfect. We would like it to be, but as a modern city it has some of the
same shortcomings as other major cities around the world. It has a rich class and a large
poor class.

It has glamorous night life enjoyed by the well heeled and also agonising daily work
performed under the sweltering heat by the less fortunate.

But the emirate, driven by a national vision, has managed to spread its wealth around
and has helped millions of needy people in Asia and Africa through continuous
humanitarian efforts in education and health care, such as Dubai Cares and Noor Dubai.

The most striking and abhorrent part of Liddle's article is the racist tone of its author
when referring to Emiratis. He describes them as "utterly useless, corrupt and indolent".

According to Liddle, even the prostitutes don't want their "business" and a poor
hardworking taxi driver would not pick them up - something never heard of here, even
by journalists, who would love to get their hands on such a story.

The Dubai described in this bizarre article is very different from the one we know. Liddle
tells only part of the story in his highly emotive language.

If he had met with the thousands of hardworking British, South African, Indian and
Pakistani expatriates who contribute to and are enjoying the fantastic development of
Dubai and other UAE cities he would have got the 'real' story of this cosmopolitan city.

I am sure there is a motive behind running such a one-sided piece, but I don't really
want to know. Had I read his article on a blog or even the website of a tabloid
newspaper, I would not have taken it seriously. Unfortunately, it was a centrepiece in a
prestigious publication I respect.
Andrew Blair says he will pick me up from outside my sleaze-bucket of a hotel, give it 20 minutes or
so, got some work to finish off. He has a job again, contracts apparently “coming out of his ears”,
which is good, because until recently he had earned a certain notoriety for not having a job and, more
to the point, for the manner in which he went about finding a new one. He drove around Dubai, back
in January this year, from the plug-ugly creek to the plug-ugly marina, in his white Porsche, with a sign
in the back window saying he wanted a job; vroom vroom he went, gizza job. Scratch scratch scratch
went the keys and coins along the side of his car whenever it was parked up.

Such conspicuous flaunting of vulgar affluence seems to me entirely appropriate for this foul city —
especially when combined with an admission of desperation and hopelessness, that scrawled sign
and telephone number in his rear window. Fur coat and no knickers, etc. But, unaccountably, the local
expats found it all a little contemptible and the journalists — none of whom possessed Ferraris —
sniggered long and loud in print, out of exquisite Schadenfreude. Just look at this idiot on his uppers,
was the subtext. But the ploy worked, and Andrew is once again in gainful employment as a
construction project manager, and therefore can remain in this country where they deport you if you’re
skint, so who’s laughing now? Not Andrew, as it happens. The whole episode, he says, made him
think, made him change his ways. Those first two years out here in this dusty and scorched semi-
reclaimed desert were enormous fun: huge tax-free income, palatial apartment — “the crème de la
crème” — silent or monosyllabic servants, all that sex (a city containing 8,000 air hostesses can’t be
bad), the fast cars, the alcohol.

But he’s a changed man, he says; that epic, shallow, soul-destroying materialism and vulgarity now
leave him cold. Being out of work for a while left him a little bruised but a better person, understanding
that money and consumer durables are not everything. A changed man. Although not that changed, I
notice, as the white Porsche pulls up.

“Why did you leave Britain?” I ask him, slung well below sea level in the bucket seat as we cruise the
baked streets past the filthy, crumbling apartment blocks where the Bangladeshi slave labourers live
or die, 10 or 12 to a room, and then into the hideous bling of downtown Dubai, a vast architectural
experiment conducted by, seemingly, Albert Speer and Victoria Beckham. One skyscraper appears to
be gilded in gold leaf, another looks like the birthday cake of a spoilt five-year-old brat — and all of
them trying desperately to be taller, flashier, more grotesque than the one next door.

“Well, you know,” he says, in a soft Scottish burr, “I think it was the immigration more than anything
else.”

“But Andrew, you’re an immigrant now…”

He looks astonished at this, as if the notion had never occurred, then says: “Yes! Ironic, I suppose.
But the difference is, I’m a wanted immigrant.”

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Up to a point. In truth, needed more than wanted. As one local put it:
“We are fed up of westerners who come here thinking they deserve an easy meal ticket. You were
nothing in the West, so you came here for the houses and cars you could never get back home, you
stole through taking out excessive finance that is not justified by you [sic] salaries. Then when you
cannot pay you run, this is theft born out of greed and arrogance.

“Anyway despite all of this you still disrespect our cultural and religious values with your behaviour,
dress and conduct in our malls and on our beaches and comments about us our race and our religion.
You spend all your time critizising [sic] our laws, society and systems. Yet, you could never have the
lifestyle you have here back in your system. You people are no longer welcome, please go and pollute
somewhere else.”

That was the message posted by a disgruntled Emirati on an expat website recently, and, as a
description of the British, South African, Australian and eastern-European workers now living in the
United Arab Emirates (UAE), it has a certain truth about it. The Emiratis are a minority within their own
country, the UAE, and an even smaller minority within Dubai, the most populous city of the UAE,
where they number about 20% of the population.

On the other hand, it seems a bit rich coming from an Emirati, the inhabitant of a country that lucked
into oil money about 43 years ago and is now utterly dependent on foreign labour for its current,
unsustainable prosperity — the ranks of the skilled and talented working class from Europe, who
come here and run their absurd, extravagant and now faltering construction projects, and the traders
and the dealers.

The British expats I spoke to believed, without exception, that the Emiratis are utterly useless, corrupt
and indolent, and, according to several, some British managers are leaving rather than abide by a
new law that requires them to employ a certain percentage of Arabs on every job. They’re simply not
up to it, they say. As it is, the locals make up less than one-fifth of the total UAE population, the
westerners roughly half that amount. The majority population in Dubai is the criminally low-paid,
enchained, abused, dispossessed peasantry from south Asia

Europeans work long hours, mind — you could not really call it an “easy meal ticket”: 12- and 14-hour
days and not much in the way of holidays. But there was, until recently, an unspoken quid pro quo:
listen, you soft, decadent westerners, you can have your salary income-tax-free, providing you don’t
lose your job, obviously (in which case we’ll deport you and you’ll lose everything you own). You can
have your big apartments, providing you don’t default on the payments when times are hard, in which
case we’ll put you in prison — there ain’t no bankruptcy get-out clauses here, inshallah. Owing money
to people is a crime. You can swan around in your flash cars and hang out at the malls, just as if you
were in Maidstone or Cottbus or Pretoria. You can dress like you were at a stag-party pub crawl in
Prague, or like an infidel whore on the make, and we’ll grit our teeth and smoke our hubba-bubba
pipes and look the other way. You can even have that other stuff you seem to like so much, the
relentless, enervating fornicating, the stuff Allah really dislikes; we will turn a blind eye to the legion
upon legion of addled post-Soviet whores in your horrible Brit-style pubs, nightclubs and wine bars,
the cheap babes from the ’stans. Just keep the money pouring in, please: keep building those
gargantuan hotels and facilitating those loans for us.

But this long-standing deal may be in the process of disintegrating. The credit crunch hit Dubai badly,
and it is clinging to its despised but less feckless neighbour, Abu Dhabi, for a very large bail-out.
Troubled state-backed firms owe British companies more than £400m. The plush apartment
complexes down at the marina are half-empty, investment has collapsed and property prices with it —
house prices are down by as much as 50% and are predicted to fall by another 20%. It is almost
impossible to put a precise figure on the rate of the collapse, because, according to one estate agent,
there is no market. Nobody is buying, nobody is renting; there is no new business. An estimated £335
billion of projects have been halted or are on hold. And it is predicted that the population could decline
by 17.1% by the end of the year, so things will not be getting better too quickly.

The depression in Dubai makes our own look like a vague afterthought, because nowhere else in the
world was unregulated and unfettered capitalism and a belief in perpetually rising property prices
embraced with quite so much ardour as here. And it seems, as a consequence, that since the crash
the locals are in recriminatory mood: if you’re going to bring us a depression, they seem to be saying,
then you can clear off and, in the meantime, behave like dignified human beings rather than dragging
us down into your gutter. The sex thing has been bothering them particularly.

Mohammed is an Emirati who owns a big dive shop a hundred miles across the burning sand to the
east of Dubai, at Khawr Fakkan, in the slightly more conservative province of Sharjah. Khawr Fakkan,
circled by stark and beautiful mountains, is on the Gulf of Oman and there is good diving to be had,
plenty of tourists. Mohammed is a divorcee and he employed young western babes and chicks to run
his business, because working in a dive centre is a sort of halfway house between backpacking and
the real world for a certain sort of young postgrad western chick. Roxanne Hillier worked for him:
young, blonde, pretty and half South African, with an English dad called Freddie. Roxanne’s in the
rather bleak Khawr Fakkan prison right now, and will be for the next few months, following an
unsuccessful appeal against her sentence in late June. Would you like to hear what she did to get
herself there?

It was about 2am when the old bill arrived. Mohammed had been filling up the 80 or so oxygen tanks
he needed for the next morning’s dive; Roxanne had returned from the last dive of the day, helped out
for a bit, then, exhausted, took a nap in an anteroom. Outside, Mohammed heard a disturbance, so he
went down to check it out.

“It was local people, gathered around the door to the dive centre,” he told me. “They were angry,
saying, ‘Who have you got in there? You’ve got a woman in there, haven’t you?’ I told them, ‘No, no,
the dive centre is closed.’ They said to me, ‘Where is the key?’ Later the police arrived. I told them
there was nobody there, but they took my key and opened the door and searched the place and that’s
when they found Roxanne.” The two of them were carted off to Khawr Fakkan prison (separate cells,
natch) and held on remand for a week until the case came to court. Did you have sex with Roxanne, I
ask Mohammed. “No, no, no, never!” Did you kiss her? “No, of course not. It is not true. It is all a
misunderstanding.”

Well, as regards the first denial, we don’t have to take Mohammed’s word for it, because the Sharjah
judicial authorities were kind enough to check the whole business out for themselves. They stripped
Roxanne Hillier bare and invaded her with swabs and scrapes; a little bit of Mohammed’s DNA found
inside her would have hugely increased the eventual sentence. As it was, she received a sentence of
three months for the crime of being alone in the same building as a man who was not her husband.
She didn’t know this was the sentence, because the court proceedings were conducted in Arabic and
therefore she could not put her case across, either. It was later they told her what had been decided.
Mohammed got a couple of weeks on the same charge.

I take a cab to the beach, Jumeirah beach, and spend 3 minutes watching sarcomas grow on the
semi-naked expats strung out across the sand under flimsy shades, E-number-flavoured Slush
Puppies to hand, their eyes closed against the vicious glare, their bodies porky and immobile. It is
46C out here, unendurable — this is the country where you should never go outside. Thirty miles or
so across the water is Iran, where they are probably not stripping off for the beach. Behind the beach
is a dusty freeway and a hospital for people with bad kidneys. It was this beach upon which the British
woman Michelle Palmer performed an ill-advised act of fellatio upon a chap she had just met — Vince
Acors, from Bromley — and ended up doing three months in the local nick as a consequence. I just
hope it was a shade cooler when Michelle went to work.
Vince did a lot of interviews bragging about the women he’d had sex with in Dubai when he got out.
Reading the interviews, you feel Vince may have been the last person in the world you should ever
give a blow job to on a beach. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Bromley say, or Downham.

Then there are the adultery cases that are stacking up. Such as Marnie Pearce, 40, sentenced to six
months initially (three months plus a £600 fine and deportation after appeal) for an unproven
adulterous relationship with a man she insists was just a friend: she was already separated from her
husband. And the case of Sally Antia, whom the police swooped on as she emerged with a male
friend from a Dubai hotel in the early hours of the morning — two months in prison reduced to six
weeks on appeal. You get the feeling that the Emiratis are feeling vindictive right now.

Nor is it just sex: the Dubai authorities are getting a bit twitchy about all sorts of western behaviour
when it impinges directly upon them. An Australian immigrant, Darren O’Mullane, had just finished a
14-hour shift as a nurse at a Dubai hospital and was driving home when he was badly cut up by
another driver who swerved in front of him. When he finally overtook this clown, he — again, ill-
advisedly, as it turned out — stuck one finger up in fury. Just one finger. Three weeks in prison, lost
everything — house, car, the lot. He told me the whole process had been devastating, not least
having to apologise to the idiot driver who was, as bad luck would have it, a UAE police official. “I am
fed up with foreigners not respecting the rules and our culture,” the puffed-up medieval official told the
local Arab media later. You can tell a lot about a country from a quick look at its policemen going
about their business. In Dubai they appear strutting, arrogant and faintly ludicrous, the sort of
policemen you might have seen in a pre-war Third World fascist theocracy. That is not too far
removed from a description of Dubai today.

The Rattlesnake bar at the Metropolitan Hotel Dubai at 10pm, just before the Filipino dance band
comes on, is the place to be; this is where the Islamic blind eye is at its most consciously,
calculatedly, unseeing. The whores outnumber the punters by about two to one, and that’s only the
lucky whores actually inside the place. There’s a phalanx of about 30 of them crowded just inside the
door, just standing and watching, possessed of insufficient money to buy drinks. Another 40 or so are
working the rooms, their buoyant pre-recession breasts rubbing up against some happy but
bewildered surveyor from Daventry, or project manager from Glasgow, or engineer from Düsseldorf.
Outside, 40 or 50 more sit at tables, or stroll arm in arm along the pathways, begging western men to
take them inside. These girls are almost exclusively Russian — but not from Moscow or St
Petersburg, or even Kiev. They are Russians from the de-Russified ’stans, drawn here by the lack of
work for people of their ethnic origin in Almaty, Dushanbe, Tashkent, Samarkand. They are a
remarkable phenomenon. I will bet that right now, in a village halfway up the Andes, or in a yurt just
south of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, or somewhere down a long broad river in Sarawak, Borneo, Svetlana
and Olga and Zinaida are sidling up to the local menfolk, offering them a bit of vigorous glasnost and
perestroika for £30 an hour.

Iliana, a pretty chemical blonde in her twenties from Uzbekistan, is telling me who she would deign to
sleep with for money. “English, good. Scottish, better. Irish, good. German, okay. But no f***ing blacks
and no f***ing Arabs.” No locals? “Arabs?” she asks, outraged. “No Arabs.”

“What if they paid you 20,000 dirhams [nearly £3,500]?”

“Oh, well, then, yes, sure,” she says, laughing.

None of the Russian girls will sleep with black people or Arabs, not even Luba from Turkmenistan,
who is a little older and a little brighter and a little more circumspect. There were lots of West African
girls in this bar not so long ago, but the Russkies forced them out. The refusal to have anything to do
with the Emiratis is not confined to the sex workers: every taxi driver I spoke to — almost all of them
Pakistani — said they would refuse to pick up an Arab. Why? “Because they are arrogant scum,” one
driver told me. Nobody wants anything to do with the Emiratis.

Luba worked in a travel agency in Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, but the money was appalling and she
needed to put her son through university, so she came here. As we talk I notice her still working,
trying, over my shoulder, to catch the eye of someone who might actually pay her for her time. She
hates her work — most of the girls hate their work — but not Iliana. “I like f***ing men,” she says
cheerfully, and disappears, presumably to meet a client. Luba looks like she will not be so lucky
tonight, which is a shame, because I like her, although she’s quite fervently racist, as they all are. As
everyone here in Dubai is, here in this lovely little melting pot, all these races gathered together,
loathing one another.

At midnight I make to leave but am stopped by Keri, who is a very attractive young lady from Almaty in
Kazakhstan. She hangs onto my jacket because she has found something very attractive to admire in
me, too. This is gratifying, if you’re me. “So lovely, so lovely,” she says, holding the thing in her hands,
turning it over and over, “I haven’t seen one like it.”

I blush a little and clear my throat.

“Um, it’s a Bic,” I tell her.

“Bic? What is this Bic?” she says shaking her pretty head, still stroking it.

“A lighter. Its name is, you know, Bic. I think they’re, er, French.”

“Aah,” she says, kohl-heavy eyes flashing. “So you have been to France, yes?”

“No — I mean, yes, um, I’ve been to France. But you can get these lighters in England too!”

Really?” She says, entranced.

“Er, yes. In Sainsbury’s. Or a corner shop. For about 70 pence.”

I give her the lighter and skedaddle, back to my hotel room. She is less pleased with the lighter now
that she possesses it.

My interview at the Islamic Information Center is a brief, uncomfortable experience, albeit conducted
with exquisite politeness and civility (on their part, at least). This is a propaganda arm of the
government, or more properly a state-run evangelistic Islamic operation aimed at westerners, situated
in a lock-up shop in a frowzy sector of downtown Dubai. What happens is this:

I sip water (they were out of beer) and ask a question like — hey, have you seen all those whores
down at the Rattlesnake? Isn’t that against the law? And then the five berobed interviewees talk
among themselves at great length in Arabic and eventually one of them explains to me very
courteously, with a shy smile and an apology, why they won’t answer the question. Not their
responsibility, you see. This happens seven or eight times, and eventually the interview is terminated.
After many handshakes I am sent on my way with a copy of a little book about how Jesus Christ was
quite a nice man but totally useless, if we’re being honest. One of the men, Wael Osman, sort of
agrees that the economic downturn has made relations between Emiratis and their western
Gastarbeiter a little more tingly, a little more fraught, and concurred that while the government turned
a blind eye to all sorts of westerner shenanigans, this was becoming harder to do of late. But when I
say “agrees” and “concurred”, I mean that I said this stuff and he smiled a little and in a very vague
sort of way nodded his head. The man I should be speaking to was the chief of police, they said, but
sadly he was away receiving a medal in Djibouti.

I didn’t really have a chance to get on to the main topic, the stuff about Dubai that really, truly offends
— and indeed should offend Islamic sensibilities. I don’t mean Luba and Iliana, although the traffic in
Russian prostitutes is brutal and violent. I don’t mean the westerners in their Porsches, or the
authoritarian nature of this place and complete and utter lack of democracy, or the vile architecture
and unbounded materialism, or the prosecution of women for the crime of standing near men. I don’t
even mean the mass rounding-up and prosecution of homosexuals, who are summarily imprisoned
and — the government has suggested — may face hormone treatment in order to make them, uh,
“better”; this is a Sodom where sodomy carries a 10-year stretch. All of that stuff makes Dubai a fairly
foul place to be, but compared to Dubai’s real crimes, they are as nothing.

Maz, a Pakistani from Lahore, drives a taxi for a living (he won’t pick up Emiratis, of course). He lives
in a room in the grim suburb of Al Quoz, a room costing £700 a month that he shares with six other
Pakistanis. His passport has been taken from him in case he nicks the car he is driving. He cannot get
home, he hasn’t the money or, indeed, the passport. Maz, though, is one of the lucky ones, very near
the top of the hierarchy of Third World workers induced to come to this country by the promise of large
wages — wages that are rarely forthcoming. Maz at least gets paid, even if all the money goes on
rent.

The bar staff are also near the top of this hierarchy. Mostly Roman Catholic Goans, they get looked
after by the hotels and even get a chance to visit their families once a year or so. I spoke to one
barman to glean a bit more detail about his living conditions, but an Emirati overseer barked
something out and the man ceased talking to me. But at least the hotels provide their staff with
accommodation, even if it is in dormitories.

t is the construction workers, the labourers — the Bangladeshis, the Tamils, the Filipinos, the
Somalians, the Chinese — who are the real scandal of Dubai. Hundreds of thousands of them lured
again by the promise of large wages, stripped of their passports, their contracts rarely honoured —
some have gone months without being paid, some have even paid just to be there. They cannot go
home. They hunker down in cramped, squalid apartments in Sonapur and Al Quoz. This is Dubai as a
slave state. There were serious riots recently in the Chinese quarter: the workers finally had enough
of criminally low wages — 500 dirhams, or about £83 a month — and continual mistreatment. The
Chinese embassy got involved. Worse still are the conditions of the south-Asian workers, the
construction men and the maids, effectively imprisoned in this country, abused by their employers,
scrabbling around in sometimes 50C heat to earn enough to pay the rent on their shared
accommodation. The Indians rioted too last year, but were forced back to work by water cannon. In
the year 2005 alone, the Indian consulate estimated that 971 of its nationals died in Dubai, from
construction site accidents, heat exhaustion and — increasingly — suicide. The figure for suicides the
next year alone was more than 100. The Emiratis were, to give them credit, appalled by this figure, so
they asked the consulate to stop collating the statistics. In October 2007 a construction-work strike
resulted in 4,000 migrant workers being flung in jail and then deported. In 2006 the campaigning
charity Human Rights Watch detailed the “serious” abuses of workers’ rights — the wages withheld,
the high rates of injury and death with “little assurance” of medical care, the passports confiscated, the
wages either criminally low or never paid. The UAE had done “little or nothing” to address the
problem. You get the picture?

Local human-rights activists, when they raise their concerns, tend to receive a visit from the secret
police; some have had their rights to practise as lawyers stripped from them.
Andrew Blair, he of the Porsche, is a project manager for construction work. He believes the condition
of the labourers is appalling, unforgivable, almost beyond belief. I suggest to him that in his position,
he could ensure that the contracts went out to firms that treated their workers fairly. He thinks about
this for a moment. “Um, well I don’t care about it that much,” he says.

He is not a bad person, Andrew, and my suggestion is probably a little naive. He is, at least,
conflicted. He acknowledges the issue and can comprehend that it is an evil. But that’s what you sign
up to when you buy property in Dubai, or go there to work, or to stay in one of its bling hotels. You
sign up to all that stuff you condone it

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed my taxi ride back to the airport with Tariq, the taxi driver from
Peshawar (he won’t pick up Emiratis); to see that towering skyscape left behind in a cloud of desert
dust. Paris Hilton had just flown in to do something pointless in a mall. When that happens, you just
have to get the hell out.

where the money comes from

GDP in 2007: £23 billion

Trading: 31%

Construction/ Real estate: 22.6%

Financial Services: 11%

Oil/Petrol/Gas: 5.8%

Dubai’s foreign debt is well over 100% of its GDP

Annual incomes

Project manager, Construction: £57,576

Project manager, IT: £38,438

IT manager: £33,891

Construction worker: ± £993

Politics and human rights

1 No suffrage

2 Political parties illegal

3 Freedom of association and expression curtailed

The UAE refuses to sign the following treaties:

4 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

5 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

6 Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families

7 Convention against Torture

Crime and punishment

8 Death penalty by firing squad for several offences

9 Death penalty by stoning for adultery

The people

Population (Inc Migrants)

Male 75.5%

Female 24.5%