Patrice just pointed (via the sarai reader list) to a fascinating little read about the impact of the cirsis in Dubai. Seems like lots of (primarily British) expats are secretly levaing the country in fear of being jailed for not being able to pay the debts amassed by their bloated lifestyles of the past years. As a result the parking lots arround DXB are becoming clogged with abandoned cars:

[…] Now, faced with crippling debts as a result of their high living and Dubai’s fading fortunes, many expatriates are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans.

Police have found more than 3,000 cars outside Dubai’s international airport in recent months. Most of the cars – four-wheel drives, saloons and “a few” Mercedes – had keys left in the ignition.

Some had used-to-the-limit credit cards in the glove box. Others had notes of apology attached to the windscreen. […]

Under Sharia, which prevails in Dubai, the punishment for defaulting on a debt is severe. Bouncing a check, for example, is punishable with jail. Those who flee the emirate are known as skips. […] [Sonia Verma in the Times online]

Make sure to also have a look at the comment section of this article as they contain a fascinating exchange between devastated expats who where ‘forced’ to leave the Emirates and Pakistanis who see this whole scenario as revenge for the hyper exploitation that characterized the boom years of the past:

Abdul Razaak, Karachi, Pakistan: Built on the sweat, blood n tears of Pakistani, Indian n Bangladeshi construction workers, this land of the rich treated us like mules n made us live in inhumane conditions for far too long. Allaah’s justice is served. How the mighty have washed away in the very sweat, blood n tears of the meek.

Tim, Cairo, Egypt: I worked in Dubai for many years and left last year with outstanding debts that I struggle still to pay. The Dubai system only helped people get into debt, there is no support to get out in a humane way.

BLDGBLG links to another article that attributes most of the abandoned cars to former owners from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and other South Asian countries, implying that the burst of the bubble is not only hurting British fortune seekers but also South East Asian migrants that made up the bulk of Dubai’s working class.

Coming back to the Waag i found the printout of Fear and Money in Dubai by Mike Davis on my table (placed there by the invaluable Patrice, who seems to have never heard of such things as emails and hyperlinks, but then you can read printouts in your bathtub, which is not a bad thing either). The article turns out to be an excellent piece about the state of affairs in Dubai, with a number of interesting observations about piracy/smuggling/terrorism/falcon-hunting:

The platform for Dubai’s extraordinary ambitions has been its long history as a haven for smugglers, gold dealers and pirates. […] Pearl fishing and smuggling were the mainstays until oil wealth began to generate increased demand for Dubai’s commercial savvy and port services. Up to 1956, when the first concrete building was constructed, the entire population lived in traditional ‘barastri’ homes made from palm fronds, drawing water from communal wells and tethering their goats in the narrow streets. […]

Following Khomeini’s revolution in 1979, it also became the Persian Gulf’s Miami, providing refuge to a large community of Iranian exiles, many of whom specialized in smuggling gold, untaxed cigarettes and liquor to their puritanical homeland, and to India. More recently, Dubai under the tolerant gaze of Tehran has attracted large numbers of wealthy Iranians who use the city “more like Hong Kong than Miami” as a base for trade and bi-national life-styles. […] Building on such clandestine connections, Dubai in the 1980s and early 1990s became the Gulf’s principal dirty-money laundry as well as a bolthole for some of the region’s most notorious gangsters and terrorists. […]

Indeed, since 9/11 a huge investigative literature has explored Dubai’s role as ‘the financial hub for Islamic militant groups’, especially al-Qaeda and the Taliban: ‘all roads lead to Dubai when it comes to [terrorist] money’, claims a former high-ranking us Treasury official. Bin Laden reportedly transferred large sums through the government-owned Dubai Islamic Bank, while the Taliban used the city’s unregulated gold markets to transform their opium taxes, paid in gold bullion, into laundered dollars. In his best-selling Ghost Wars, Steve Coll claims that after the catastrophic al-Qaeda bombings of the us embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, a cia scheme to target bin Laden with cruise missiles while he was falcon hunting in southern Afghanistan had to be aborted because he was in the company of unnamed Emirati royalty. […]

In addition, al-Maktoum for almost a decade provided luxurious sanctuary for Bombay’s Al Capone, the legendary gangster Dawood Ibrahim. His presence in the sheikhdom in the late 1980s was hardly low-key. ‘Dubai’, writes Suketu Mehta, ‘suited Dawood; he re-created Bombay in lavish parties, flying in scores of the city’s top film stars and cricketers as guests, and took a film starlet, Mandakini, as his mistress’. In early 1993, according to the Indian government, Dawood, working with Pakistani intelligence officials, used Dubai as a base for organizing the infamous ‘Black Friday’ bombings in Bombay that killed 257 people. Although India immediately requested Dubai to arrest Dawood, he was allowed to flee to Karachi, where he is still sheltered by the Pakistani government […]

Read the full article here. Also 2 clicks away from endnote 48 is one of the most deadly restaurant critiques i have ever read (especially if you are british!)

Spend a day in Dubai yesterday and that place is positively insane. will post in more detail later, but in the meanwhile some initial observations.

About the first thing i noticed – even before leaving the transit area of the airport – was that the local authorities do not have much love for this blog. in fact they have so little love for it that they censor it:

No clue what i have done to piss-off the sheiks, but my guess would be that they also assume some kind of connection between me and 9/11 (see here for a more detailed explanation of their censorship policies).

Now if that is the case then i would not let me into their country (which they did) and if i were them i would reconsider censoring the Internet in the transit zone of an international airport, which is even more pointless that censoring the Internet in general.

Of course they Sheiks themselves like their Internet uncensored, so the wireless network of the Emirates First Class Lounge (which leaks outside the lounge) does not block any pages.

Spend most of the rest running through construction sites taking pictures and talking to a fair amount of construction workers (more on that later). next to the incredible construction boom that makes europe look extremely 20th century the most striking feature is how well maintained public services are:

One would assume that given all the individual wealth that is enjoyed by the Emiraties there would be no incentive to maintain a fairly decent public transport system (which like all other road transport becomes completely useless during rush hour), well regulated taxis or well maintained public parks on prime beach front locations, but all of these do exist and seem to be fairly accessible to a wide range of the population.