"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!/ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away."

One look at the vast construction under way in modern Dubai - a sparkling city sprouting from the desert sands - and one might be reminded of this closing quatrain in Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias."

Just as in the sonnet, in Dubai a worldly ruler is overseeing the construction of an ostentatious display of his wealth amid the desert sands.

The Capital of the 21st Century

In Canada's The Globe and Mail, the Nigerian-Canadian journalist Ken Wiwa recently described Dubai as follows: "On the main street of the global economy there is a place where all the roads and diversions created by things like free trade, immigrants, open borders, closed borders, mass tourism and the jetliner intersect - and there stands a city-state that is being promoted as the capital of the 21st century."

What will this capital of the new century look like? The projections are staggering. Already under construction in Dubai are the world's tallest skyscraper, the world's largest mall and the Burj al-Arab, which will be the world's only seven-star hotel, built to resemble a billowing sail atop its own man-made island. Rooms start at just under $1,800 per night - before local tax and service charges.

Some projects are so patently unbelievable at first mention that even their promoters resort to using incredulous disclaimers. Visit the website of the massive Ski Dubai complex - the third largest indoor ski resort in the world, in a city with a latitude similar to Hawaii's or Cuba's - and one is greeted by the assurance that the resort offers "Skiing. Yes skiing; skiing on snow."

Tourist destinations like "Dubailand" - a 3 billion square foot theme park - are aimed at attracting up to 15 million tourists annually by 2010. As Salem Bin Dasmal, CEO of Dubailand, recently explained to the World Economic Forum session on the Middle East in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, his goal is to create in Dubai a family resort destination akin to Orlando, Florida.

If all the construction mentioned so far sounds impressive, the reader should prepare to be even more dazzled in the future. In a recent Washington Post article, Saeed al-Muntafiq, CEO of the large Dubai-based Tatweer development corporation conceded that everything that has been accomplished so far represents a mere 10 percent of the overall vision Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum has for his city-state.

Such wide scale amassing of wealth has sometimes muddied the waters when it comes to making distinctions between the personal finances of the ruling families and the national economies of the Emirates they rule.

The Economics behind Dubai's Construction

Where does all this wealth come from?

The United Arab Emirates' location along the southern coastline of the Persian Gulf is definitely a boon - the area serves as a hub for much of the petroleum-based transactions taking place in the region, and is a tourist magnet blessed with a hot, sunny climate and no imminent threat of major natural disasters.

But the Emirs ruling this collection of tiny potentates have also created an oasis of relative calm in an otherwise turbulent region of the world, attracting multifarious international investors ranging from banks to real estate and recreational developers.

And their efforts have paid off. Forbes magazine recently ranked two of the Emirs - U.A.E. President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum - among the 10 wealthiest rulers on the planet. In Dubai, that's not bad considering the city's main source of income just a few decades ago was from fishing and pearl-diving.

Such wide scale amassing of wealth has sometimes muddied the waters when it comes to making distinctions between the personal finances of the ruling families and the national economies of the Emirates they rule. As Forbes magazine reported in its May 22 edition, "The lines often blur between what is owned by the country and what is owned by the individual. For instance, we figure Dubai's Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum gets substantial wealth from his government's stake in banks, aluminum and real estate companies."

But the buzz around Dubai in the past few years has also attracted foreign capital and expatriates from around the Middle East and the world beyond. Many foreign companies have been attracted by tax incentives in Dubai's free-trade zone "clusters", which bear names like "media city", "internet city" and "healthcare city".

American magnate Donald Trump is among those who succumbed to Dubai's allure, as he recently announced his intention to build a $600 million residential tower on the largest artificial island in the world, which is shaped like a giant palm tree afloat in the Persian Gulf off Jumeirah Beach Resort.

And Dubai's developers have already been targeting the European tourist and homeowner market, with the top newspapers awash in glossy full-page ads announcing the city-state's emergence as the destination of the future.

The Unprotected Foreign Workers

But behind the dreams and capital invested by the few to create modern Dubai lies the toil of the many.

Hundreds of thousands of low-skilled foreign migrant workers have come - the majority from India and other South Asian countries - to complete the massive construction projects now underway. Although more than 80 percent of Dubai's private sector workforce is accounted for by migrant workers, the U.A.E. is not party to the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families or other key international human rights treaties.

As Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented, many of Dubai's migrant laborers have gone into thousands of dollars of debt to obtain visas and passage from their home countries. Upon arrival in Dubai, many live in squalid, cramped conditions in desert shantytowns and are in virtual bondage to their employers, far from home and unable to afford to pay off their debts. Local and international newspapers have reported that the migrant workers are not paid for months on end, and that they are discouraged from forming unions to champion their rights in the workplace.

This past March, as many as 3,000 migrant workers rioted at the Burj Dubai skyscraper construction site, demanding better working conditions. Their strike quickly spread to more laborers who were working on a new airport terminal nearby.

Prior to that, according to U.A.E. government figures, at least eight major strikes took place in the second half of 2005. In late 2004, five laborers at Dubai International Airport were killed after a reinforcement cage supporting a wall collapsed, calling into question the overall safety of construction sites around the city.

In Dubai, there is a prominent contrast between the lofty dreams for the city as a Middle Eastern success story and the appalling reality being lived by those who are laboring to bring those dreams to fruition.

A City of Contrasts

In Dubai, there is a prominent contrast between the lofty dreams for the city as a Middle Eastern success story and the appalling reality being lived by those who are laboring to bring those dreams to fruition.

If today's political climate in the greater Middle East is akin to the chaos and turmoil of the Wild West of American history, Dubai is a globalized gold rush that is not showing signs of abatement anytime soon. But it is a gold rush that will have to be tempered with caution if they are to avoid entrenching the already evident class divisions between the distinct groups of foreigners arriving in Dubai - some from the developing world to work, and others from the developed world to play.

In this microcosm of the globalized world - how fitting it is that one of Dubai's artificial island archipelagoes is being created in the shape of the countries of the world - it is important not to propagate the same shameful divisions of the haves and have nots that set apart the developed and developing world beyond Dubai.

Increasingly, people in the West are considering choosing beautiful, modern Dubai as their destination for vacation, business or an expatriate adventure, while the governments of the European Union, the United States and Australia are currently looking into free trade agreements with the United Arab Emirates.

They would do well to investigate whether the government and corporations in the U.A.E. are working in earnest to improve conditions for the vast legions of migrant workers there. If not, the dazzling jewel city of Dubai could become tainted as a colossal wreck on the human rights front.




Conor Fortune is a freelance journalist and former Rotary World Peace Fellow who is currently based in New York.

To read a Global Envision article about globalization's urban impact, see A Bumpy Ride Toward Modernity for a City in India.



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