Have you ever been to Dubai? If you haven’t, the chances are that you know someone who has. It seems to be the 21st century Vegas – playground of the rich that mere mortals such as you or I can also enjoy and wonder at.
“You must go!” say its champions, who return from its fake islands and multi-starred hotels, drunk on the decadence and excess that seeps from the foundations of this manufactured paradise.
No, I mustn’t. And I won’t, for two reasons.
The first is that it’s been built on the exploitation of foreign workers. Workers are shipped in from poverty-stricken countries, with the promise of high wages and a new life for themselves and their families, only to find themselves trapped in a foreign land, living in squalor, with no rights, no access to medical care and no way of getting home. And all so the rich can get richer, and so a regime that pays scant regard to human rights can play along with the democracies of the world by creating a playground for the super-rich.
It stinks. And the celebrities who endorse Dubai for the opportunities that are propped up by this slave labour – for that’s what it is – should hang their heads in shame. This report – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7985361.stm – will tell you more.
The second reason I will never set foot in Dubai is for another reason that the authorities there would rather not mention in their tourism ads: freedom. Or rather a lack of it. Because while Dubai may attract the wealth and status of a Western international city, it certainly does not have its liberty.
Just ask Michelle Palmer and Vince Acors who were thrown into prison by the Dubai authorities for allegedly having sex on a beach.
Now I’m not saying that sex in public is acceptable. But it just goes to show that Westerners who are seduced by the bright lights of the city should not forget what a deeply conservative country they have stepped into.
For their alleged sexual indiscretions, this couple was sentenced to three months in prison. They should consider themselves lucky. For if they had been gay, they would have been persecuted; arrested, treated for their ‘illness’, perhaps publicly flogged, and quite probably jailed for a long, long time. And that’s just the ‘official’ treatment. Who knows what other violent acts they may be subjected to while in custody.
I am well aware that the UAE is not the only country in the world to take this kind of stance on homosexuality, and Western values in general. It just sticks in my throat that Dubai is marketing itself as some kind of impossibly wonderful paradise when the reality is quite different.
But then, to be honest, even if it didn’t exploit foreign workers; even if it didn’t have antiquated laws and social attitudes that criminalise the innocent – I really wouldn’t want to go there anyway.
Because do I really want to visit a city where all of its ‘beauty’ is manufactured? How long can you really stroll around a city that can offer tonnes of extravagant architecture but not a single grain of history?
Perhaps Dubai will continue to grow, and to please its government with its ever-increasing list of status-boosting extremes. Or maybe it will sink into the sand as quickly as it grew, trashed by the global economic meltdown, on whose origins it was so greedily built.
Whatever its fate, one thing is for sure. Whether it’s human-built wonders such as castles and skyscrapers, or natural wonders such as wildlife and landscapes, Dubai can’t hope to compete.
Here in England, it may not be as big. But it’s certainly all for real.
