We landed at Dubai International Airport shortly after 10 P.M. feeling like zombies after a fifteen-hour flight from Washington, D.C. Yet once Bill and I entered the airport terminal, I woke up as if I’d just downed five espressos. The baggage area was frantic with passengers taking this first opportunity to indulge in the local version of duty-free shopping—Cartier and Chanel, Russian caviar and French champagne—before heading out into the hot breath of night. Weary passengers revved up by shopping. We drove into the city and onto Sheikh Zayed Road, the main drag. The night skyline was a pastiche of vanity skyscrapers and giant-size shopping malls with no discernible pattern or aesthetic. Not Middle Eastern or European or Asian or American; not urban or suburban; not tropical or northern. There was little evidence of quirky neighborhoods or old-fashioned anomalies, at least from the highway.
Billboards and banners advertising every conceivable international luxury brand added to the sense that you weren’t quite sure where you were, only that you were surrounded by wealth. New trains—empty at that hour—on the new elevated track hugged the highway. Several buildings were entirely dark at night, which locals said meant they were empty. Driving through that surreal city, I felt as if I had stumbled onto a movie set.
Nothing quite prepares you for Dubai. I had read up on its extravagances and made a list of Dubai’s nicknames: “Singapore on Steroids,” “Manhattan on Speed,” “Oz–Las Vegas,” “Miami in the Gulf” or “Disney in the Desert.” Those sobriquets are inadequate for the breathtaking scope of this tourist fantasy made from scratch at the mouth of the Arabian Gulf in what used to be forgotten desert scrub brush lit at night by stars and home to nomadic tribes who gave way to nimble traders.
Now it is a tourist’s paradise. Dubai’s malls are legendary in the Middle East and South Asia for selling more brand names outside of any city but London. Its nightlife with free-flowing drinks and a “united nations of prostitutes” for hire is a stunning rarity in a region best known for war and strict Islamic social and religious rules. Big-name architects built fanciful hotels here; one is underwater. Everything in Dubai has to be the biggest, the best, or the most outrageous: from the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, to an indoor ski slope in the desert at the Mall of the Emirates. Travel and tourism magazines can’t write enough about all of its over-the-top milestones and uninhibited night scene. Russians and Germans, Italians and Brits, Indians and Chinese, Saudis and Iranians, and Afghanis from both sides of the war come to Dubai to relax. The beaches are cosmopolitan, with women wearing bikinis. The golf courses, horse races, car races, sports stadiums, and film festivals bring in celebrities from around the world, often for a fee. Restaurants serve every cuisine imaginable.
All of this was built in a few decades, at warp speed. Everything was imported: from the people and the materials to the culture filling up the new museums in neighboring Abu Dhabi. Cost was no object: this air-conditioned desert fantasy requires more energy use per person than any other spot on the globe. Understandably, Dubai was considered a one-off original, too bizarre to be duplicated. That assessment proved totally and completely wrong. Today, Dubai is considered a model for tourism in the twenty-first century. Its neighbors in the Gulf region are trying to duplicate its success, even the conservative rulers of Saudi Arabia, who are vamping up the Hajj with glitter and high-end resorts. Foreign delegations visit to take notes. Only China has garnered more accolades for its attractions. The elite World Travel & Tourism Council gives Dubai credit for breaking open the Middle East tourist market as “one of the world’s leading case examples of an economy which has positioned Travel & Tourism as a strategic priority for long-term development and prosperity.”
The success of Dubai, though, is more prosaic, and basic. First, in a region drenched with oil money, Dubai (and to a lesser extent its neighbor Abu Dhabi) has staked its fortune on tourism—a sign, if we needed one, that tourism is the globe’s stealth top industry. Second, and most important, this Middle Eastern emirate is a rare bare-bones example of what the industry of tourism looks like unfettered. Few if any major tourist spots have been built solely and entirely as a business. Here the tourist or traveler is treated like a consumer. None of the folderol about finding oneself or disappearing from the troubled world to discover anew the beauty of Mother Nature or the wisdom of an exotic culture. Examining the tourism industry in Dubai is like looking at the engine of a fancy sports car with its hood off. The parts are all there to see as well as the dynamic of what keeps the motor humming. A journey through Dubai—and Abu Dhabi—is a practical course in tourism and its future. It is a pretty frightening one, too.
This is made possible because Dubai is a monarchy, one of the seven emirates in the loose federation of the United Arab Emirates. Officially the UAE is a constitutional monarchy but without universal suffrage or full democratic elections. (Less than 10 percent of the citizens are allowed to vote or run for office and these are chosen by the sheikhs.) This means the sheiks and royal families are free to run their emirates more or less as they wish. They appoint their advisors and members of their councils and legislative bodies; they have the effective say over what laws and regulations are passed. The citizens of Dubai are more like subjects, but very well-paid subjects. The saying goes that with the UAE’s discovery of oil in the 1960s, every soul in that stretch of sand hit the lottery for life. The oil wealth of the UAE means there are no taxes, no duties, free housing and subsidized utilities for most citizens.
There is the rub. There are very few Emiratis. Most of the people living and working in Dubai are foreigners—at least 85 percent of the working population in a country of over 3 million people. Foreigners run Dubai—the airlines and hotels, the consultancies and the banks. Yet they all live there on temporary visas with no political rights to speak of and no official say in government decisions. The foreign workers at the bottom rung are famously deprived of nearly all their rights. They are brought in from the poorer communities of South Asia and live in labor camps under conditions that would be illegal in most countries. Experts believe that this very cheap foreign labor was as important as oil wealth in underwriting Dubai’s growth as an international tourist attraction.
Citizens without votes and foreigners without rights leave the sheikhs in charge to organize Dubai without fear of protests or popular backlash, lawsuits or sit-ins. There are no political parties to contend with or to protest the extravagance that requires the highest water consumption per person in the world and some pretty awful sewage disposal that has polluted or destroyed many of the beaches. No independent citizen groups exist to halt construction that threatens the environment or to protest the sound of jets flying in at all hours of the night; no labor unions to demand better pay and living conditions; no independent experts to impose regulations on those skyscrapers.
Dubai’s leader, Sheikh Mohammed, of the ruling Al-Maktoum family, has taken full advantage of the circumstances to push the business of his emirate. In a 2007 Newsweek interview he described himself as the “C.E.O.” of Dubai. He has won praise from business groups for his dedication to efficiency and growth. When the global economic meltdown brought Dubai to its knees in 2009, its high-flying status seemed doomed even after Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the seven emirates in the UAE, bailed out Dubai with loans of over $10 billion. Yet, while the rest of the world struggles, Dubai has rebounded, welcoming millions of tourists again—three times as many foreigners as New York City. At the end of 2010, Dubai’s most expensive hotels were full during the Muslim holiday of Eid Al-Fitr and, again, for New Year’s Eve.
One reason is location. Dubai is an oasis of conspicuous consumption on the edge of a region simmering in conflict. Taliban commanders from Afghanistan have been known to disappear to Dubai for a break. During the Arab Spring, when dictatorships were being challenged throughout North Africa, the Dubai hotels were filling up again with both the citizens of the countries of the Arab Spring and the tourists who normally visited the Pyramids of Egypt or the beaches of Tunisia.
So that missing sense of place that I felt that first night is all part of the business plan. In Dubai you could be anywhere and nowhere. It is a playground for tourists, after all. And wasting resources and calculating the cost to the environment isn’t part of the spread sheet here. Here the industry rules with few regulations or restrictions, where the centerpiece of a journey in the United Arab Emirates is widely advertised extravagant consumption with no concern about the cost. And in our age of dramatic climate change resulting from such consumption, the basis for this tourism success story is wildly unsustainable. Dubai and the United Arab Emirates are models for the overconsumption that is threatening the planet.
• • •
Airports are the foundation of any tourism industry. Once I slept off my jet lag, I went back to take a closer look at Dubai’s three enormous terminals. I walked into what can only be called temples to duty-free shopping. Even the two oldest terminals—Terminals One and Two—are polished to the highest sheen. A huge gold palm tree stood at the center of the concourse, marking a gold counter that actually sells gold in value of 18, 22 and 24 carats. Then I power-walked over to Terminal Three, which raised the shopping bar even higher. This time, the décor suggested a swank hotel, even a palace, with an atrium that climbed to the heavens. Marble and gleaming brass and endless escalators and elevators: everything to make you comfortable and put you in the mood for shopping.
Everyone could be tempted into buying something here: perfumes, fashion, toys, food, cameras, sunglasses, luggage, more gold, jewelry, liquor. Upbeat modern songs floated through the air; restaurants and cafés were full; Indian men in work clothes were buying whiskey to take home; and women in veils were spritzing perfumes. In 2010, Dubai’s duty-free shops sold $1.25 billion to passengers, placing the airport up in the rarefied company of Singapore and Amsterdam airports, the top duty-free heavy-hitters.
That retail triumph is woven into Dubai’s status as a major air hub. It began with geography. Dubai is at the cross roads between Europe and South Asia, the Middle East, North Asia and Africa. Over 100 airlines fly out of Dubai to 100 destinations. During the annual Hajj pilgrimage, Terminal Two is crowded with the faithful going to Mecca.
Yet fifty years ago there was no airport. Dubai was still a rough-edged port city, famed for pirates, gold smuggling and turning a blind eye to questionable imports and exports, not to mention money laundering. Oil had just been discovered. Sheikh Rashid, then the ruler of Dubai, decided to take a page from other ambitious small port cities like Singapore and become a regional center for trade, finance and especially tourism. By necessity, Dubai would not depend on its oil supply.
Those were the earliest days of modern tourism, when the industry was expanding through the airlines. This new technology of transoceanic flight was opening up the world, country by country, with new airstrips, landing rights and full-fledged airports. Cities were clearing farmland beyond the suburbs and paving runways. It was a point of pride that countries created their own national airlines to be flagships of these airways. France is the obvious example of how the old world responded. As the world jumped into the age of tourism, the French modernized the Orly airport south of Paris, built in 1932, and then in 1974 added the enormous Charles de Gaulle Airport to the east of Paris, giving Air France its own terminal.
It wasn’t obvious why Dubai needed an airport. No one had heard of it and there was nothing to do there, no cultural sites to see, no reason to spend the night, much less a week on vacation. The sheikh went ahead anyway and built an airfield and terminal following the now-tired principle of “build it and they will come.” He pursued an “open skies” policy of basically unrestricted landing rights in Dubai in order to attract business from near and far. And he raised the ante by stocking the airline terminal with the region’s first duty-free shopping, a move that helped make the place profitable from the start and somehow fitting for the emirate with an outsize reputation as a pirate’s haven. The emirate was still under nominal British rule, and these old colonial masters weren’t thrilled with the idea of a new airfield. The sheikh was undeterred. At first, the new “international” Dubai airport depended on flights from the regional Gulf Air, and planes from other companies that stopped off for refueling. Once that airport was built, people did spend time in Dubai, mostly traders or diplomats, and they needed a hotel. None existed.
The sheikh pushed and an Airlines Hotel was built near the airport in 1960. By the end of the decade the Carlton Tower and the Ambassador Hotel had risen near the airport to lodge people on layovers and guests of locals. Dubai was ready to proclaim itself a “tourist destination” and in the 1970s to sell its beaches and balmy weather—the Miami or the Mediterranean of the Middle East. The large chain hotels took the bait. Sheraton and the Intercontinental built five-star hotels, and European sunbathers showed up for winter holidays on the sand and warm waters of the Persian Gulf, with palm trees and camels as backdrop.
Spreading travel and tourism beyond Europe and North America was tricky, requiring a pioneer spirit. Ed Fuller, the president and managing director of international lodging at Marriott International, told me that hotels followed airplanes. He helped mastermind Marriott’s expansion overseas, especially in the Middle East, and is an informal historian of tourism. “To win landing rights in many countries, airlines had to promise that hotels would be built for the people who came on those airplanes. That’s one of the reasons Hilton became an international company.”
The ball was rolling. Completion of the Dubai airport led to hotels that led to more new airlines using the airport and then more new hotels for the tourists they brought in. By the end of the 1970s, Dubai’s airport actually looked international, with the now-defunct British airline BOAC and the German carrier Lufthansa leading the way. By the 1980s over forty airlines were flying into Dubai. In the meantime, Dubai became independent from Great Britain and joined with neighboring emirates to create the UAE in 1971. About ten years later, as they were sorting out their future prospects, several of these gulf neighbors got into a quarrel with Dubai. The regional airline company Gulf Air, then backed by Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Oman, wanted Dubai to pay it subsidies and give special concessions. Sheikh Rashid wasn’t happy with the demand, and when he refused to accept these conditions, the airline cut back services to Dubai.
That could have put a severe dent in Dubai’s plans for tourism, so the sheikh made the wildly risky decision to create an airline just for Dubai that he named Emirates. With $10 million and the help of two British expatriate airline experts, he put his son Sheikh Mohammed, the current ruler, in charge of starting up Emirates and turning it into the region’s star carrier.
That was 1986—an auspicious moment in tourism and all the stars aligned in Dubai’s favor. Just as Emirates was getting off the ground, the world opened up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the 1990s previously closed economies were jumping into the world markets, especially in Asia: China, India, and Southeast Asia. Emirates saw an opening and got landing rights to fly into these newly developing countries, especially the second- and third-tier cities that had only known puddle-jumper airlines, what the industry called “under-served areas,” which became lucrative markets when the middle classes started flying, on Emirates Airlines.
More advanced technology allowed the airline company to focus on Africa and Europe and eventually North America. Thanks to that gift of geography, Dubai now served a market of 2 billion people living within four hours by plane and another four billion within seven hours. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, long-haul jets can fly nonstop for up to 16 hours, and Emirates Airlines could offer nonstop flights to Washington from Dubai, or to Sydney and even to São Paulo.
“Dubai completely changed the rules of the game,” said Richard Quest, the CNN anchor and airlines correspondent whom I met when we both spoke at a tourism conference in Abu Dhabi. Quest said it would be hard to underestimate how central the airports and airlines have been in transforming Dubai into a world-class tourism destination, how Dubai willed itself to become one of the major hubs in the airline world. In a few years, it could be the hub.
The very weakness of Dubai—a blank canvas, in the middle of nowhere with a tiny population, no claim on a great history or culture, and an archaic government—became its strengths in the tourist industry. And the loosening global marketplace meant Dubai had access to cheap labor and all that oil money to finance the venture.
Emirates Airlines is wholly owned by the government and spent the billions of dollars necessary to eventually buy a fleet of the best airplanes. (No airplane is older than five years by company policy.) It has been profitable from the start. Further, Emirates can offer “world-class service” at reasonable rates below that of the competition because its costs are much lower. And since citizen complaints about the noise or environmental impact of airports are irrelevant, Emirates can offer night flights, large terminals and plentiful runways unavailable in other countries where locals demand restrictions and regulations.
Labor costs at Emirates are at least 30 percent lower than those at other airlines, largely because labor laws for the lowliest workers in the emirate are considered nearly medieval in a country of such wealth—a point of special importance for construction of those hotels, palaces and stadiums. Pilots and other members of the professional staff are paid competitive international wages, which are especially attractive because there are no taxes in Dubai. The lower on the employment scale, the lower the wages, whether in housekeeping or catering. At rock bottom are the countless construction workers who built the airport and hangars. And like all foreigners, they live in Dubai on two-to-three-year temporary visas that are granted at the request of the employer. That means if your employer is unhappy with you, you’re not only out of a job; you are on the next airplane out of Dubai.
Whatever works for business becomes government policy in Dubai, Inc.
Today, Emirates Airlines is ranked as the world’s largest airline by passengers carried and by capacity. It is easily one of the most comfortable airlines I’ve ever flown on as well as one of the most convenient and inexpensive in that part of the world. Remarkably, when I had to fly from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, the easiest and least expensive route was through Dubai on Emirates Airlines, even though that meant double the time in the air.
Alain St. Onge, the CEO of the Seychelles Tourism Board, said that Dubai is the most popular transit point for flights to his island nation off the coast of Africa. “We have more transfers from Dubai by far, more than from Johannesburg. If we want more flights, Dubai always said yes. Other airlines had to figure out the pros and cons. Dubai could say yes.”
Other airlines have called foul and accused Dubai and Emirates Airlines of providing hidden, questionable subsidies for jet fuel. So far, none of the charges have stuck, although Emirates resists adding extra charges other airlines have been forced to impose, and even dropped the fuel surcharge in 2012 as the price rose.
To understand the repercussions of having such a huge and growing airline, consider the value of business done with frequent-flyer miles. Started as a marketing gimmick by American Airlines in 1981, frequent-flyer miles are now considered one of the largest currencies in the world. In a 2005 analysis, The Economist magazine valued frequent-flyer miles as greater than the U.S. dollars in circulation that year. British Airways said its frequent-flyer miles are one of the four biggest currencies used to buy airline tickets.
Airlines and airports are in a category of their own in the tourism industry.
Today, Dubai is the third-largest airport in the world for international passengers and poised to grow even larger. Within five years Dubai plans to complete an entirely new airport at Jebel Ali that will be the largest in the world. At that point the Gulf region will have a greater airport capacity than the combined giants London Heathrow, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt. Already, the head of Air France is warning that this stretch of sand on the Gulf is poised to dethrone Western Europe as the globe’s central air hub.
• • •
As the rest of the world struggled to recover from the Great Recession of 2008, tourism in Dubai was up within two years, with 4 million passengers flying into Dubai in one month alone. So what do all those millions of tourists do on vacation in Dubai?
First, they shop.
Leaving the airport for the city itself is part of the experience. Bill and I rented a car with a driver and headed to the city. In daylight shops beckoned you at every corner. I brought along one of the standard tour guides, Footprint Dubai by Zee Gilmore, an expatriate who was born in Dubai and raised in England. She gushes: “Is there anywhere else on earth that can claim to be so attuned to the whims of tourists, so wholly dedicated to the entertainment of its guests and so completely accomplished in the pursuit of pleasure?”
I vote NO—Dubai wins by a mile.
Driving down Sheikh Zayed Road, we passed ever-larger shopping malls with glamorous names I recognized from glossy magazines. This is the Middle East’s version of Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive, London’s Oxford Street, New York’s Fifth Avenue and Paris’s Avenue Montaigne. This is why deposed rulers of Pakistan, an exiled former prime minister of Thailand and Saudi princes make Dubai their home away from home. We opted for the famous Mall of the Emirates, where “shopping is just the beginning,” and the newer Dubai Mall.
The expanse of parking lots rivaled those at a professional football stadium; we worried about getting lost. This wasn’t a shopping mall, it was a city. In the desert heat of Dubai, shopping malls substitute for town squares or public parks. Locals meet their friends and families at the mall, and walk around in large circles in a mall version of a Spanish paseo, stopping for a meal, then catching a movie, all under the same roof. For tourists, these air-conditioned shopping malls are often the closest they get to meeting locals. We passed young girls eating ice-cream cones with their cell phones glued to their ears. Emirati families crowded in front of a floor-to-ceiling aquarium, the children screaming when a shark swam by. Mostly we saw foreigners. Soon we were picking out the European languages—French, Spanish, German—and judging from a woman’s robes and scarves, figuring out the different Muslim nationals represented in the shopping frenzy.
And they were shopping. Over 450 clothing stores were listed in the directory. I was dizzy writing down the names of all the designer shopping bags looped like bracelets on these ladies’ arms: DKNY, Cerrutti, Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Missoni, Fendi. This is one of the planet’s “hottest shopping spots.”
We took a break at one of the 75 restaurants and cafés listed in this one mall. Our choice was Le Pain Quotidien, a Brussels-based chain, comparing the sandwich to our favorites at the outlet in our Washington, D.C., neighborhood; nearly the same taste. If we had wanted, we could have picked up a snack at one of the pricey grocery stores, too. Entertainment was next on our list. The two big choices were an amusement park called Magic Planet and the jewel in this crown—Ski Dubai, a fake indoor ski slope in the middle of the desert.
From the outside looking in through thick plate-glass windows, Ski Dubai resembles a giant snow globe, with fake snow falling, a ski lift, and real humans skiing and snowboarding. The ceiling is painted the blue of early dusk. Distant mountains rise on a painted mural. Lights are dimmed to add to the effect. Children clambered up the bunny slope, celebrating a birthday. Their parents sat on the other side of the windows drinking coffee at the St. Moritz Café and watching their children slide down in toboggans.
Suleh Sueed Abdullatif of Ski Dubai guest relations hovered nearby. He told me he had been a policeman for five years but left his job to work in the mall’s snow slopes because he had always wanted to travel. His new job gave him the feeling he was in Europe. “I have never been to the mountains, but I have no need to go there now. I have it all here. This is real snow, man-made real snow,” he said. “I used to do sand boarding in the desert, but it is hard on real sand. Now I go snowboarding here on my time off.”
We had this conversation in English, that limited “global” English that is sufficient for a sales transaction, directions or chitchat. (I do not speak Arabic.)
Abdullatif captured the premise or promise of Dubai. The real world can be replaced with theme park artificiality. No expense is too great. Experience is negotiable. Everything can be imported or borrowed, then packaged and sold to the tourism industry. A simple slide down a small man-made slope has a superficial appeal over sports on a cold mountaintop; a flight to Dubai takes the place of a hike through the Alps, the frustration of speaking a foreign language and the adventure of living in a foreign culture.
Everything in the modern tourism industry discourages such an effort. The Kempinski hotel in the mall is a case in point. “Snow in August” headlines a story in the Kempinski glossy magazine extolling the virtues of staying in one of their fifteen ski chalets “overlooking a gigantic snowdrome in the middle of the desert; the incongruous contrast it offers between the stifling temperatures outside against the minus 1 degree Celsius that is maintained within Ski Dubai at all times . . . you can enjoy a cool experience that’s unrivalled by any hotel anywhere in the world.”
That is Dubai. Nothing can rival any number of the hotels built to outclass each other. The Hydropolis Hotel is the “first underwater luxury resort” built on the seabed, over 60 feet below the water; its suites have clear Plexiglas walls to view artificial bubbles and sand and “mermaids.” Then there is Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, rising higher than two Empire State Buildings piled on top of each other. Here you can stay at the Armani Hotel Dubai, advertised as the first hotel developed by the Italian designer Giorgio Armani. Fine dining includes Japanese, Mediterranean, Indian and, of course, Italian. Nothing Middle Eastern, though; that is not part of the “Armani lifestyle experience.”
I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to stay in a hotel underwater or one in the highest building on earth so, for a different brand of opulence, Bill and I visited the Atlantis Hotel. This is the second Atlantis built by a South African millionaire—the first is in the Bahamas and is advertised ubiquitously as if it were the original Atlantis surfaced from its watery grave. The Dubai Atlantis is a megaresort on Palm Jumeirah, the world’s largest artificial island, which cost the government $12 billion to build from desert sand and millions of tons of rock. To the consternation of environmentalists, native sea life was destroyed during the dredging. The government said that new, foreign fishes have since colonized the waters. As we drove down the causeway, we passed new residences and villas built in an architectural style that might be called modern Ali Baba. Then through the heat haze and across a snaking narrow bridge the pink-palazzo-colored Atlantis Hotel rose into full view, an image straight out of a James Bond movie.
The hotel fosters that impression. Its opening in November 2008 was an extravaganza of fireworks seven times larger than the display at the Summer Olympics in Beijing that year and reportedly big enough to be seen from outer space. Two thousand celebrities came, including Denzel Washington, Charlize Theron, Robert De Niro and Michael Jordan, although a few declined, saying it might not be a good idea during the Great Recession to decorate the opening of a hotel that charges $37,000 a night for its penthouse suite.
We arrived on a mildly sweltering morning. Tour buses and taxis were lined up outside along the seawall. Giant bubbling fountains marked the entrance, past the security guards who were easily appeased when we said we had come for lunch. The lobby is the size of a small auditorium, defined by icing-white palm columns that disappear into an arched canopy over a 40-foot Dale Chihuly sculpture. Its crystal-blue glass twists ending with a golden flare gave the place the feel of a high-class Arabian boudoir. Gold leaf decorated murals and mosaics with seahorses and other underwater creatures. The piped-in music had an underwater sound as well, the kind you hear at a spa. Then we turned around and saw the point of the décor. There was a truly gigantic two-story aquarium, home to 65,000 fishes and sea animals, including flapping manta rays and whale sharks. (The whale sharks were later released after protests from animal rights groups.)
We slid into the crowd in front of the floor-to-ceiling glass panels, next to a Sikh family from the Punjab, a young French couple and two Russian tour guides planning a package tour to the hotel. Everyone was pointing and exclaiming “Ooh” or “Aah.”
After all of the artificial and make-believe of Dubai, it was amazing to see real fish. The hotel also has real dolphins, flown in from the Solomon Islands so guests can swim with the mammals in “Dolphin Bay.” In this instance, the people trying to protect wildlife wish the hotel had not pulled the dolphins out of the sea. There is also Aquaventure, a water park with a “Lost Civilization of Atlantis” water slide, a Royal Pool Beach, Zero Entry Pool, and an activity schedule rivaling anything offered on a cruise ship: hula hoop contests, touch rugby for teens, potato sack races, limbo contests, a movie lounge, video arcades, craft-of-the-day at the Kids Club, ping-pong, trampolines, a tennis academy, book reading on the beach for small children and Dubai bus tours, plus shops, cafés and restaurants. Also like the cruise ships, the staff here came from everywhere: Turkey, the Philippines, the United States, Great Britain and India.
You could spend a week at the “Palazzo” of Atlantis and never leave the resort and its 112 acres, which is the point. Ed Fuller, of Marriott, said that the all-inclusive resort, “where guests spend most of their money in your hotel,” brought the greatest profits in the hotel industry today.
All that seemed in jeopardy during the Great Recession when Dubai had to borrow billions from Abu Dhabi and experts were predicting the demise of the emirate, especially its rise as a tourism haven. The prospects of Dubai defaulting again are high, in part because the terms of the loan and even the size are not public. Dubai’s public debt is spread out among various government-owned investment conglomerates, including the Nakheel property firm, a subsidiary behind the Atlantis. No one knows whether the initial $10 billion bail-out was enough and whether the current recovery will be enough for Dubai to repay an $18 billion principal that is due on its state-owned entities. (The question of sustainability rests on Dubai’s extravagant debt as well as its outrageous use of energy and its environmental degradation.) The leaders assured their creditors that they could go back to the basics, leaning even more heavily on tourism.
Yet the Atlantis Hotel is a success story, at least on the surface. Even though it opened during the recession and caters to wealthy clients who might have lost a good chunk of their portfolios, the hotel is in demand. During the 2010–11 Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, there wasn’t an empty room. Why tourists from near and far wanted to spend the holidays away from home in one of Atlantis’s nearly 1,600 rooms can be answered by that James Bond image.
Dubai has done such a good job nurturing its glamorous, brash, devil-may-care image that the city made it into the latest James Bond novel, Carte Blanche, as the site of danger, and of course lots of luxury products. The backdrop for the movie Sex and the City 2 was Abu Dhabi, with Carrie and her friends cavorting in an imaginary desert city. (Abu Dhabi refused permission to film the licentious story in the emirate.) In Filipino and Indian films Dubai is the Promised Land reachable by selling yourself out as a common laborer and then hoping to either strike it rich or fall in love. The Dubai Studio City complex, the Hollywood of the Gulf, attracts Middle Eastern, European, Asian and American television and filmmakers who routinely use Dubai as a backdrop.
Those films feed tourism—just check the official website for tourism in Austria. Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music are central to the “brand” of the country.
The appeal of Dubai stems in part from its location on the volatile edge of Middle Eastern and Asian war zones. Each new conflict brings more tourists. Some are disguised as soldiers. On our plane from Washington, we were surrounded by mercenaries or contractors who flew into Dubai on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, with some serious time off in the emirate. These young men with short haircuts looked like they might have been recently discharged from the Marines and were hired on contract to take part in one of the wars—as private guards, in logistics, transport or a dozen other fields. Dubai reminded me of Thailand during the Vietnam War, when American soldiers were given short vacations from the war for R & R (rest and recuperation) and many of them spent their time off on Thai beaches and Bangkok bars, marking the beginning of the Thai tourism boom.
With its monolithic government devoted to tourism, Dubai and the UAE have cashed in on the eruptions of war and revolution in the Middle East. In the spring of 2011, Dubai hit the jackpot when thousands of tourists fled Egypt as the government faced down demonstrators demanding freedom in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. This Arab Spring of revolution was a historic turning point for democracy but a headache for the tourist industry as cruise ships were diverted to Turkey and holiday makers switched their vacations from Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh Red Sea Resort to Dubai, lifting hotel occupancy by more than 25 percent and adding thousands more shoppers to the crowds attending Dubai’s annual Shopping Festival. Tunisia, where the revolts against corrupt dictatorships began, lost half of its tourism business, some of it diverted to Dubai.
In 2011, during the wave of revolutions, Dubai emerged as the top city for tourism in all of the Middle East and Africa, attracting not only the greatest number of tourists but the greatest amount of money spent by tourists.
That success has translated into an impact on the biggest single annual tourist event in the world—the Hajj pilgrimage during five days of the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar. Devout Muslims are required to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, once in their lifetimes, as long as they are physically fit and can afford the journey. Mecca was the town where the Prophet was born and lived until he moved to Medina, where he died. With the modern ease in travel and inexpensive airfare, the pressure for permission to make the Hajj to Mecca is immense. No more than 3 million Muslims are given visas every year. (The shorter Umrah pilgrimage to Mecca can be taken at any time of the year and is not required.)
Religious pilgrims were some of the first true mass tourists in history. Worshipers traveling as a group to foreign lands to seek salvation needed lodging and food, inspiring innkeepers and Church officials to open their doors to the faithful and create new businesses and direct religious spectacles. Eventually, Christians followed three great pilgrimage routes: to Jerusalem, to Rome and to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
The Islamic pilgrimage of the Hajj has been in continual practice since the seventh century. The traditional route to Mecca was overland, from Damascus, Cairo and Aqaba, traveling south down the western edge of the Arabian Peninsula to Mecca. Or they traveled from Kufa and Basra in eastern Iraq across the desert to Jeddah as the stopping-off point for Mecca. This larger region from Jerusalem to Jeddah is the epicenter of religious pilgrimage. Jerusalem is considered sacred by all three of the desert faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For all these faiths, the “journey” is one of the most ancient and deeply felt similes. A faith journey tells of conversion and redemption. An actual pilgrimage is an act of faith.
In earlier years, making the Hajj could be a dangerous proposition. Bedouin tribes robbed the pilgrims as their primary source of income until the Ottoman Empire took over the peninsula and put an end to the attacks. Instead, they paid the Bedouins to protect the foreign pilgrims on their way to Mecca and Medina. The pilgrims who bought camels from the Bedouins and lodging and food along the route were the main source of money for the region. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Ottoman rulers built a railway connecting their capital, Istanbul, to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. That was the railroad that was attacked by Lawrence of Arabia in the Arab revolt against the Turkish Ottomans during World War I. Then oil was discovered and Saudi Arabia became one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
Today the antique Hajj railroad is gone and most pilgrims arrive in Jeddah by airplane. The Hajj has become a multibillion-dollar business fueled by the religious requirement for billions of Muslims to make the pilgrimage and the mathematic reality that no more than 3 million are chosen to make the Hajj every year.
That’s the sort of situation that gives pilgrims a sense of joy to be given visas and opens up unwelcome possibilities of all kinds of sweetheart deals, if not corruption, for those making the selections.
As the custodian and protector of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the king of Saudi Arabia and his government are in charge of all things Hajj, deciding how many pilgrims can come from each country, approving changes to the holy sites and building new rail systems and airports. It would be as if the government of Italy decided which Catholics could visit the Vatican and fulfill an absolute requirement of their faith as well as decide how to alter the appearance of the churches and St. Peter’s Square.
The pilgrimage is so critical that Islamic countries have cabinet ministers just for the Hajj. They lobby Saudi officials for more Hajj allotments, and they set up elaborate bureaucracies for doling out who receives a spot, which travel agents work with the government on Hajj and how much it will cost—systems that often have room for hidden bribes. The government of Indonesia, the nation with the world’s largest number of Muslims, holds deposits of $2.4 billion from citizens who are on the waiting list to make the Hajj at Mecca. In 2006 ministry officials were convicted of “misusing” these Hajj funds and bribing government auditors to approve the Hajj accounts. Anticorruption groups have launched a campaign to open to the public how the Indonesian government spends the pilgrims’ money to buy air tickets and lodging in Saudi Arabia, acting on reports that the current closed-door system hides several million dollars in bribes. The campaign is popular since the least expensive package to make the Hajj is nearly $3,500—which for the average Indonesian is their entire life savings.
In Bangladesh, political groups successfully lobbied against “irregularities” in the government’s handling of Hajj travel that left thousands of Bangladeshi pilgrims without accommodation or meals. Pilgrims will now receive regular passports, not flimsy “pilgrim cards,” and the government promised that the housing will be adequate and food catering will last through the entire visit.
The temptation to make money off of devotees doesn’t disappear even in wartime. In Afghanistan the minister of Hajj and pilgrimage fled to Britain after being accused of embezzling $700,000 of Hajj funds from the poor. Mohammad Sidiq Chakari denied the charges against him but refused to return to the country to stand trial.
The Hajj itself is a voyage of a lifetime. Pilgrims routinely describe their trip as a religious reawakening. Dubai has made itself an essential part of that trip. Terminal Two in Dubai is a stopover for Hajj flights, a gateway to Mecca. Emirates Airlines offers a special twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week telephone service in English and Arabic to keep everyone informed of any changes and to answer complaints. In 2008 the demand proved so great that Emirates Airlines added thirty flights from Dubai to Jeddah at the last minute. For wealthier travelers, Emirates has a deluxe religious Hajj package with private tours and five-star hotel accommodations.
I was in Dubai at the time of the 2010 Hajj, and could see the commotion and excitement at the airport. Like all non-Muslims, I am forbidden to enter the Holy City. Instead, I followed the pilgrimage in the local newspapers, impressed by photographs of the Grand Mosque in Mecca awash in pilgrims. It was a miracle how they all performed the rites in such packed spaces and with reverence and harmony. Photographs showed believers throwing pebbles seven times to symbolize human attempts to cast away evil. Others gave us a snapshot of the multitudes walking seven times around the Kaaba, the black enclosed stone that symbolized God’s oneness and God’s center at the heart of human existence. Many were reciting the pilgrim’s prayer: “Lord God, from such a distant land I have come unto Thee. . . . Grant me shelter under Thy throne.”
Unmentioned was the dramatic physical change in this sacred landscape. Rising in the center of Mecca, near the Kaaba, is a cluster of new luxury skyscraper hotels and condominiums, a shopping mall and a clock tower that bears a striking resemblance to London’s Big Ben. This new construction was built by some of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest developers with the enthusiastic approval, and sponsorship, of the government and against the protest of religious preservationists who sought to protect the centuries-old buildings and neighborhoods that were torn down to make way for the glittering new commercial center.
Sami Angawi, an expert on Islamic architecture and the public voice of the preservationists, has written treatises on the need to save the traditional character of Mecca, its buildings, its history and its layout that treated the faithful as equals. The new development, he argues, destroys that physical declaration that all are the same in the eyes of the Lord. Instead, only the wealthy can now afford to live in the center of the holiest of holy spots, in those new luxury hotels and apartments, while the poorer pilgrims are pushed out into the faraway suburbs.
“We are witnessing now the last few moments of the history of Mecca,” he said in 2005, when he realized the campaign to save the antique treasures of Mecca was lost. “Its layers of history are being bulldozed for a parking lot.”
It seems counterintuitive that the socially conservative Saudi government, which forbids women to drive and puts severe restrictions on the mingling of the sexes based on Islamic tenets, would be in favor of tearing down old Mecca and replacing it with a commercial development along the lines of the luxury tourist destinations of Dubai. Isn’t materialism the antithesis of religion?
Wahhabism, the dominant Islamic doctrine of Saudi Arabia, believes that historic preservation of buildings associated with the Prophet Mohammed or holy sites might become a form of idolatry. Developers seized this interpretation to win approval for the Mecca projects in what is considered a holy sanctuary, throwing up those glamorous new towers and making glamorous profits at the same time. They argue that they are creating more space for the annual Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages, which are expected to grow to some 20 million annually by the next decade. Those old buildings, they say, were hovels, and the residents were more than happy to sell them and spend the profits on new homes in the suburbs. And they are improving the infrastructure, building a light rail system from Jeddah to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
These are the reasonable responses you might expect from a tourist official in Dubai. The goal is to increase hotel rooms to accommodate more travelers with an emphasis on high-end visitors and rational transportation. In that sense, the religious pilgrimages to Mecca fit firmly in the model set by Dubai that is transforming the tourist industry throughout the Middle East, especially on the Arabian Peninsula.
Competition over pilgrim tourists is familiar to Palestinians. The only way foreign Christians can make a pilgrimage to the West Bank town of Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, is through Israeli checkpoints, including the wall built on three sides of the town. In an affront to Christian Palestinians, the Jewish state has won control over the traffic and Israeli tourist agencies reap most of the profits from the pilgrimages.
By contrast, the thousand-year-old European Christian pilgrim’s route to the northern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela is no longer a strictly religious venture. It is now an official World Heritage Site, preserving the physical way to the great cathedral that is believed to hold the relics of Saint James the Apostle. The Christian faithful now share the road with tourists—who may or may not believe anything about the religion but share an esthetic appreciation for the sacred route and a love of exercise. Somehow, this has revived the popularity of the route, and the tourist business has enriched the region’s economy immeasurably.
To anyone who has made a pilgrimage, this makes sense. Whether walking alongside the Hindu faithful on a crowded, song-filled holy day to the Ganges or with Buddhists celebrating the New Year walking to Angkor or in the quiet contemplation of my Christian faith on a Good Friday walking the Stations of the Cross at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., I know firsthand that the pilgrims themselves are best at creating the spiritual landscape. The question is how much the tourism industry can intrude on their journeys before the religious character is subsumed.
• • •
We left Dubai and drove down the E-11 Highway to Abu Dhabi. Clouds of brown dust swirled across our windshield as heavy machinery clawed the parched earth on construction sites that had shut down following the 2008 recession. In those days foreigners were going broke and fleeing the country en masse, leaving their cars in the parking lots at the Dubai Airport. There were predictions of the death of Dubai. Now, the boom is back, at least on the surface, and construction cranes dominate the bleached-out sky.
As the traffic thinned, we noticed oddly painted old school buses filled with men dressed in identical dungarees. From a distance it looked like a prison bus in the United States. The windows were dirty, but from what we could see of the faces of the men, they appeared to be from South Asia. Finally it dawned on us that these were the foreign workers that built all those luxury hotels in Dubai. They were the men we saw from a distance, gaunt figures, some with scarves wrapped around their heads against the heat, climbing scaffolds and filling construction sites.
All those hotels in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, whether American chains that cost $500 a night or deluxe hotels that cost $5,000 a night, were built by men like these. And they were paid only $175 a month for their labor.
“The first-world wealth for citizens and professional expatriate workers is created through third-world wages of Asian laborers,” wrote Syed Ali in his book Dubai: Gilded Cage. He believes the poorly paid migrant labor has been as important to Dubai’s economic success as oil. Otherwise, the emirate could never have afforded its architectural fantasies.
The buses head toward an area called, logically, Labor Camp. Here these foreign workers are often housed in crowded, squalid buildings with often-fetid bathrooms and scant running water for bathing, drinking and cleaning their clothes. They are bused from the labor camp to construction sites and back again. That is their life. Camp—work site—camp—work site. Construction goes around the clock with workers bused in shifts back and forth, from morning to night to morning, working without any extra pay for overtime or staggered schedules. I could see them from a distance as small figures hoisting steel and hammering at the top of improbably high buildings. We had seen them at dusk the day before, waiting in very dirty overalls for buses to take them to the camps.
While tourists have no idea that the hotels where they are staying were built by men who are often treated like indentured servants, in the human rights community the issue has become a cause célèbre.
Dubai and all of the UAE reject international labor regulations, including the Migrant Workers Convention, and reject any role for the United Nations’ International Labour Organization. Wolfgang Weinz of the ILO’s tourism department said that labor unions are frozen out.
“I have no idea, honestly, what goes on there other than what I read in human rights reports,” he said, explaining that the ILO cannot work in countries where workers do not have independent rights. Dubai and Abu Dhabi prohibit freedom of association to create a union, and reject international rights of migrant workers, whether male construction workers or female domestic workers.
Those human rights reports have been scathing. In the seminal investigation Building Towers, Cheating Workers, Human Rights Watch detailed “wage exploitation, indebtedness to unscrupulous recruiters, and working conditions that are hazardous to the point of being deadly.”
A British report was even harsher, saying “the labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British.”
Essentially, these investigators describe the working conditions as miserable. Poor family men from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh pay several thousand dollars in finder’s fees to land construction jobs only to discover the pay is nothing as promised. Immediately on arrival at the Dubai airport, the workers have to hand over their passports, with visas, to their recruitment agents, essentially giving up their rights for the duration of their two- or three-year contracts. They are bused to the bleak camps to begin construction work. Often their first two months of pay are withheld until they leave. Their monthly salary of roughly $175 a month is especially pitiful considering the UAE has a per capita income of $4,070 a month, which is higher than the annual incomes of average workers in the men’s home countries on the subcontinent.
Construction workers have staged occasional demonstrations in Dubai—shutting down a major highway in one instance—but to little effect. They are prisoners of the country’s sponsorship system, which applies to all foreign workers. You can only work in the UAE with the sponsorship of a company. Once you lose your job with that company—and complaining about poor wages or dangerous working conditions means you’ll be fired—then you lose your visa and must leave the country.
The labor camps for these workers are off-limits and so are the construction sites in Dubai and Abu Dhabi that I tried to visit. So I asked a local investigator to visit the camps for me and bring back a report as well as photographs under the terms that he remain anonymous.
The camps house not only construction workers but the taxicab drivers that ferry tourists around town. The older barracks-style buildings house eight to sixteen men in a room. “You can imagine the smell of these construction workers crammed into the room. They have one small window they don’t want to open because they’re stuck in the desert, far away from everything and if they open the window the sand blows in.
“These guys are semiliterate. They’re together with only other guys, no women, and they don’t take good care of themselves. Plus they’re working all the time. It’s crazy,” he said. “They seem depressed.”
These foreign workers may seem invisible to tourists, but they are essential to creating and maintaining Destination Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. They not only build the hotels; they are the menial porters and tea servers, drivers and deliverymen. Their female counterparts are just as critical—the housekeepers at hotels and in the homes of the professional class. And their poor treatment is starting to cause concern.
Newspapers in the Gulf area occasionally carry accounts of worker discontent. A popular article in the National newspaper of Abu Dhabi was the story of a Bangladeshi maid who cut off her employer’s penis because she was sick of the seventy-year-old man trying to sexually molest her. Domestic workers like maids, housekeepers and cleaners in hotels and private businesses and homes depend on the fairness of their employers since there are few laws protecting them. The maid told the police she took drastic measures because she saw no other way to stop him from raping her. These domestic workers are as vulnerable as construction workers in the face of cruel employers.
When asked, locals point out that no matter how bad the situation in the UAE it has to be better than at home or else all those workers wouldn’t pay the shifty recruiters to be sent to Dubai. And the remittances they send home are further proof. Somehow, most of the workers send the lion’s share of their small salaries home, preferring to live miserably in those camps so that their children can be sent to school.
In the globalized world these labor practices are largely hidden and Dubai doesn’t suffer any opprobrium. The city of Dubai welcomed 8.3 million foreign tourists in 2010, while the huge country of India, home of many of the construction workers, received fewer than 6 million foreign tourists.
Tourists visiting Dubai see a modern, forward-looking country with designer hotels and splashy music concerts. They have no idea of the medieval social practices underpinning this twenty-first-century lifestyle. This is “pick and choose” globalization: embracing open-skies airline policies to challenge European supremacy and bring in tourists; selectively opening borders to attract migrant workers while rejecting the other promises of globalization to improve lives with fair employment laws and respect of human rights.
This has nothing to do with the cultural differences of an Islamic nation. Tourists are told in advance that the UAE prohibits public displays of affection and all illegal drugs, puts severe restrictions on drinking alcohol and on desecration of their faith. Tourists have heard the stories of random application of these laws leading to a year in prison for consensual sex between unmarried couples or for questioning the supremacy of the Prophet.
And yet in bars and clubs, hotels and restaurants, foreigners can indulge in just about anything as long as they keep it private. Drunken, rowdy nights with young foreign prostitutes, drugs that slipped through the radar—the over-the-top nightlife of foreigners in Dubai has been described in glossy magazines around the world, with irony, wonderment and scorn. Hotel concierges, restaurant maîtres d’hôtel, locals and fellow tourists take new arrivals aside and clue them in on how to get around the public restrictions. The advice: take a taxi home if they have had even one drink, and go to bars and clubs like the York or the Cyclone to find the newest prostitutes.
Prostitution is illegal in the UAE, but beautiful women prostitutes are plentiful in Dubai, especially if you can afford thousands of dollars for a night and bottles of Dom Perignon champagne. It is part of the emirate’s attraction. Business travelers expect to have a wide range of choice among women, and occasionally men, for hire. Many, if not most, of these young women were forced into prostitution, just as the young women in Cambodia and Thailand. But in Dubai they have been brought from foreign countries by gangs of human traffickers. The stories of these enslaved young women are as heartbreaking as those I encountered in Cambodia. And given the country’s visa policies requiring employer sponsorships, the government clearly approves of this modern form of slavery and enables the business.
Sex tourism has become an integral element of the twenty-first-century global industry and Dubai’s tourism constitutes no exception. Getting away from it all now includes the possibility of paying for sex with a stranger for kicks, diversion, or something darker. An estimated 26 million young women and men are trafficked every year to and from every continent to be placed in servitude as sex workers or laborers. As one of the most labor-intensive industries, tourism has profited mightily from the growing business in human trafficking. None of this is hidden. In the 2011 Trafficking in Persons Report, the U.S. State Department said that the UAE was a “destination for men and women, predominately from South and Southeast Asia, who are subjected to forced labor and forced prostitution.”
The tourists and visitors don’t seem to mind. A local businessman told me that in 2008 the big news was the deportation of 5,000 Filipina prostitutes to make way for an equal number of young Russian women, adjusting to the changing tastes of men visiting Dubai.
• • •
After a two-hour drive we arrived in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the UAE, built on a series of islands. We crossed the bridge and headed toward the famed Corniche, a wide promenade along the beach with wide spaces for walking, jogging and cycling framed by palm trees that define the passage and catch breezes off the gulf. Driving down the Corniche, with trees and green spaces, the inevitable sight of towering skyscrapers seems less overwhelming.
This is the emirate that is making its name as the cultural alternative to Dubai. Everything is high-end here: a Ferrari Formula One sports stadium complex with the world’s fastest roller coaster; Arabian stallions at the Abu Dhabi equestrian club; a modern palace of marble and gold, with gardens as large as New York’s Central Park, became the Emirates Palace Hotel and includes an ATM machine that dispenses gold ingots; and, finally, an entire separate tourist island for branch museums of the Louvre and the Guggenheim that contain treasures of the world.
Those museums seemed a safe if expensive investment to affirm the elegance and stature of Abu Dhabi and give it a boost in the competition for tourists. It was an art-world twist on the UAE habit of importing whatever they wanted from anywhere in the world to bring in tourists. Eminent architects were hired. Frank Gehry designed the new Guggenheim Museum as an exuberant pastiche of modern shapes. Jean Nouvel designed a sleek spaceship-capped complex for the new Louvre. The two museums will be centerpieces of the new tourist and culture center on Saadiyat Island, along with a national museum named after Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the UAE, that will exhibit traditional Islamic art and calligraphy and showcase the nation’s history.
This sure bet turned out to be a major headache, proving the old industry adage of tourism being a double-edged sword. Once you depend on foreign tourists, you become vulnerable to international standards and tastes.
At first, French critics denounced the Louvre agreement as the crass sale of their nation’s “cultural heritage” or patrimony to an oil-rich emirate that wanted an instant museum. The French government responded that it was simply exporting French culture. What took the French centuries to collect, catalogue, study and curate, the government of Abu Dhabi would purchase in one contract for the cool sum of $1.3 billion. That gives the emirate the right to use the name of the Louvre, receive loans from the Louvre’s vast store of art, special exhibits and instruction on how to manage the museum and its treasures.
The financial rewards outweighed the cultural complaints, especially after it was reported that the French were being nice to Abu Dhabi in return for the UAE’s purchase of French armaments and Airbus airplanes for its Etihad Airways.
That controversy was a small blip compared to the announcement by American artists that they would boycott the Guggenheim arrangement to protest the treatment of workers in the emirates. Organized by New York artists along with Human Rights Watch, more than 1,100 international artists, curators and writers signed on to the boycott, saying they refused to have anything to do with a museum built by workers treated so poorly. “Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers. Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same kind of respect as those working with cameras and brushes.”
The UAE’s deplorable labor record was finally raised as a matter of public debate through the intervention of artists. The list includes Janet Cardiff, Thomas Hirschhorn, Mona Hatoum, Krysztof Wodiczko and Harun Farocki.
The artists have demanded that Abu Dhabi’s Tourism Development & Investment Company enforce rules that forbid the huge fees that workers pay recruiters before they arrive in the UAE. Their petition also asks that workers be given the right to demand better and safer working and living conditions. Slowly, the UAE and the Guggenheim have acceded to the demands, beginning with hiring an independent monitor to insure that workers weren’t paying onerous recruitment fees. And while the artists are serious, their boycott does not threaten the final outcome.
The effort will improve the lives of the workers on the tourist project, but it has had darker consequences as well. At roughly the same time, Abu Dhabi signed a contract with a private American firm to create an elite battalion of foreign mercenaries. The contract specifies that these foreign soldiers and police are to be trained in crowd control to put down labor unrest or any other form of protest by unarmed civilians. The wave of civilian political revolts against authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and nearby Bahrain during the Arab Spring apparently made the rulers of Abu Dhabi nervous.
• • •
In the middle of a multibillion-dollar building campaign, with a calendar filled with festivals headlined by world-class sports car drivers and hot entertainers like the Jonas Brothers and Prince, the government of Abu Dhabi decided it was time to host its first Green Tourism conference in November 2010. “Green” has become an essential part of every national tourist campaign. I was invited to speak on the keynote panel.
We gathered at the new conference center and were ushered to a private majlis, or audience, with Sultan Bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority and singular sponsor of the three-day event. True to Middle Eastern custom, the room was one oblong of generous chairs arranged to allow everyone to enter, acknowledge each other and then sit for desultory conversation. The sheikh was the last to arrive and he took the empty chair waiting near us. When it was my turn to speak, I asked: “What inspired you to hold a green conference for Abu Dhabi tourism?”
With utter charm, the sultan looked around at his senior aides and asked, “Why? Why not?” We all laughed and it was time to open the conference. Richard Quest, the CNN anchor, was the master of ceremonies and said this was “the first time such a conference has been held in this part of the world, and for that very reason it takes on a new importance.” He then introduced the sheikh, who said the issue of sustainable tourism “defines our industry and the times we live in,” that green tourism is not a “niche concept” but one that requires “a seismic shift in the way we do business.”
He revealed the results of a recent market survey showing that two out of every five tourists is willing to spend more money for an environmentally friendly destination. “In other words,” he said, “there is a high-end market waiting for us to deliver.”
That was the tension throughout the conference: how do you keep making all that money from tourism, keep that industry at the top of its game, while decrying its ill effects. Ministers of tourism from New Zealand and Thailand underlined how their countries depend on tourism for 10 percent of the gross national products—the biggest industry for both countries, bigger than lamb in New Zealand, bigger than rice in Thailand—and the extraordinary efforts required to keep attracting all those tourists.
During a break Suraphon Svetasreni, the head of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, told me how the government designed a program to keep tourists coming even in the time of war. After demonstrators took over Bangkok’s international airport in 2008 to force a change in government, he designed a crisis program. He put it into play in 2010 when new demonstrations broke out and Bangkok suffered through seventy days of urban violence. Fires destroyed several blocks in the city’s swank districts. While the government and armed forces battled the rebels from their own crisis center, Mr. Suraphon set up a parallel tourism crisis communication center.
With members of the Thai Tourism Industry Association and Thailand’s hotel association joining him, Suraphon launched a virtual campaign on Facebook and YouTube showing you could still have an idyllic vacation despite the fighting. Airplanes were rerouted. “We used social media, and sent out photographs of people on the beach in Phuket and in Bangkok, in the parts where there were no problems—showing it was okay to come to Thailand,” he told me.
The tourism trade in Phuket actually doubled from the previous year, proving, he said, that you can work around a revolution as well as a global recession. “Tourism is strong,” he said. “No one wants to give up their vacation.”
During the first morning panels several of the local hoteliers extolled the “green” standards of Abu Dhabi and Dubai for lowering energy usage and costs with new technologies. Gerald Lawless, executive chairman of the Jumeirah Group, described his hotels as “luxury without guilt.” He was referring in part to the Burj Al Arab, the luxury seven-star hotel built to resemble the sail of a yacht that incorporates ingenious energy-saving, cooling and lighting technology. But it was built on an artificial island that pretty much wrecked the natural environment of that beach and is part of an overall destination that produces more carbon per capita than any other spot in the world.
As at most conferences, some of the best conversations took place outside the official discussions. Several foreign nonprofit tourist operators complained of “green-washing” by the hoteliers. During the lunch break Ashraf Faisal Hegazy, an architect who heads the sustainability committee of his Dubai architecture firm said that the “green” standards in the UAE were far too weak, “almost meaningless.”
“Their use of water, energy, their glass walls and air conditioning allowed under these standards are all out of place in our desert,” he said. “And Abu Dhabi is allowing the building of more and more massive new hotels that strain the infrastructure.”
Hegazy argued that architects and engineers should apply lessons from the original desert dwellers, building with pillars and screens that caught breezes and took advantage of cool mornings and evenings without air-conditioning. “You don’t need it—that was proved in New Mexico,” he said.
About 20 miles outside of Abu Dhabi, a multibillion-dollar project called Masdar is attempting to do just that but on a mammoth scale that has become the norm in the United Arab Emirates. Promising to be the first carbon-neutral city in the world, the architects and engineers are using modern technology and ancient urban desert design like narrow streets and latticework screens that fight off the heat and glare of the sun. Eventually this refuge should show the way to a desert life after the oil economy runs dry. Masdar is part of the larger Masdar Initiative to develop alternative energy in the UAE, investing in solar, wind and nuclear.
The poor environmental record of tourism in the UAE was rarely mentioned at the conference meant to advertise that Abu Dhabi was intent on becoming known as a “green” destination, however loosely defined. For the last three years, the UAE has had the worst score in the Living Planet scientific report showing each nation’s per capita “environmental footprint.” Produced by the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, this survey measures the annual resources consumed and waste produced. On the graph the UAE’s carbon consumption stands as tall as the skyscrapers that attract the tourists and pollute the country. What is most remarkable is that this small desert nation consumes more resources per person than the United States, which ranked fifth, or Saudi Arabia, its neighbor on the Arab Peninsula, which ranked twenty-fourth.
What does that reckless consumption look like? You can find many of the problems caused by that waste in the water. Dead fish in the rivers, ruined beds of coral, raw sewage on the beaches, ever-saltier water in the seas.
The dead fish can be found floating in the Dubai Creek, victims of the pollution in the river that flows through the city and celebrated as one of its tourist attractions. In 2009 the number of dead fish exploded to more than 100 tons. Most were pulled out and buried in overflowing landfills. Many were strewn along the beaches where the gulf flows into the creek. The stench from the decaying fish was overwhelming; many were undersized and the few that were breathing appeared to be paralyzed. Marine life has had a hard time surviving during this rush to build a major tourist destination. During the dredging to create the artificial island that is home to the Atlantis Hotel, the only known coral reef off of Dubai was destroyed as well as the turtle-nesting sites. (In his presentation, Gerald Lawless noted that his Jumeirah hotel group started a turtle rehabilitation center in Dubai and has returned twenty-five turtles to the sea.)
Those beaches have also been bathed with pungent tides of raw sewage, toilet paper and chemical waste material. The problem is simple. There aren’t enough sewage plants to treat human waste, so it is retrieved from septic tanks, hauled away in trucks and dumped into drains that go straight to the sea. It is cheaper for hotels. The construction of a second sewage treatment plant has helped, but raw sewage still courses through the sea and onto beaches. Garbage and sewage from the millions of tourists simply outpace the infrastructure.
This has become a common problem in resort areas around the world. Bali, the ultimate paradise, is now inundated with sewage and garbage from the millions of tourists who test its limits. All these tourists produce waste—human waste, garbage—that goes into illegal dumps or is thrown into rivers and the ocean. As in Dubai, there just aren’t enough public collection and waste disposal sites. Everything suffers and yet more and more hotels are going up on the island. Olivier Pouillon moved to Bali, married a Balinese woman, and started a family and tackled what he considered the island’s worst problem: garbage from all the tourism. He set up his own nonprofit in Bali to encourage hotels and the local government to do something about the growing burden of that waste. He told me that it needs to be regulated just like “pollution, methane and carbon pollution from hotels and resorts. These resorts pump out trash and pollution like factories.”
Trouble in paradise takes on a whole different meaning when truck-loads of human shit are dumped into the sparkling blue seas.
Several government speakers at Abu Dhabi’s World Green Tourism conference accented all the positive work underway, implying that their emirate was trying to learn lessons from the mistakes of Dubai. Her Excellency Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, of the Environment Agency of Abu Dhabi, promised that she is putting “environmental protection at the forefront and not waiting until all you can do is mitigate the damage.”
To that end, she painted a picture of the UAE as home to “huge” numbers of birds and wildlife with the “unique ability” to survive in the harsh conditions of the salt marshes or the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert and home to fish sheltered in the intricate coral reefs of the Persian Gulf. This starkly beautiful landscape, she said, has shaped Emirati culture and is the spirit of Bedouin poetry whether in verses about hunting with falcons or camping in the desert. And, of course, it is the backdrop for parts of the Koran.
“We are people of the desert. We are people of the sea,” she said. “We have a fantastic natural heritage.”
What an elegant Scheherazade for the conference. Her stories of Abu Dhabi and the Emirates spoke of days from long, long ago when there was no pollution, no destruction of wildlife habitat, and no tourism geared toward consuming, consuming and consuming. At most, the princess made an oblique call for action; otherwise, she said, “we lose our heritage.”
Many of those birds and wildlife have already lost their homes, sacrificed to the construction of more hotels and resorts. The falcons were saved—falconry is now on UNESCO’s cultural heritage list. Margit Gabriele Muller, a German veterinarian, directs the preservation effort at the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital, which has won awards for saving more than 30,000 of the endangered birds.
At an earlier conference in Abu Dhabi, Paul Vercammen of the Sharjah Breeding Centre for Endangered Arabian Wildlife warned that the remaining wetlands of the UAE were either “developed or earmarked for development.” That leaves shorebirds like the bald ibis, the slender-billed curlew and the sociable plover on the critically endangered list of threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
And since the Arabian Peninsula is also at the crossroads for migratory birds from Europe and Asia to Africa, this destruction threatens those birds as well. The only answer that these scientists have come up with is the creation of protected areas fenced off from developers who want one more glamorous resort spa at the expense of the nearly extinct Arabian leopard and the Arabian oryx whose lithe body and curved horns are the emblem of the region. The governments are slowly agreeing and creating the equivalent of protected parks, drawing on the native concept of hema, one of the world’s oldest systems for conserving and protecting rangeland, which was critical in a nomadic society. The Sir Bani Yas Island wildlife preserve south of Abu Dhabi is also an inspiration, initially under the protection of Sheikh Zayed, and now a respected reserve as well as a draw for tourists.
The crisis has nearly overwhelmed conservationists because “perhaps more than any other region in the world the Arabian Peninsula has seen massive social and environmental change in only the last 50 years,” according to the report written from a decade of these workshops. The culture of Bedouin poetry had no influence over owners of five- and six-star hotels.
Nothing is safe from the developers. Along the shore, just west of Abu Dhabi where we were meeting, the salt flats, or sabkhas, that were part of that old nomadic world are disappearing. To hoteliers these inhospitable stretches of white salt-crusted water are a nuisance that need to be destroyed to create attractive beach properties. To geologists, these flats—the largest of their kind in the world—are not only essential to preserve a healthy shore life, they are a rare record of sea levels from prehistoric times. Graham Evans and Anthony Kirkham, scientists who have been studying the sabkhas since the early 1960s, have been leading a campaign to convince the government to preserve these flats.
“We have seen what has been going on and we feel horrified,” said Professor Kirkham in an email. “Unfortunately, recent dredging and infill of the lagoons, road building, pipe laying and other civil engineering projects are rapidly and irrevocably changing both the lagoon and groundwater salinities and destroying this coastal area.”
The two scientists believe that “a carefully preserved part of the coastline and its adjacent sabkha plain would undoubtedly attract considerable attention from both visiting scientists and educated members of the public especially if it is backed up by a good museum display explaining the coastline, its history of development, and its relevance to the petroleum industry.
“However, time is short and the whole unique area will soon be lost to the world unless some action is taken very soon.”
The speakers at the Green Tourism conference were captains of business and well versed in the high cost of tourism to the natural world all around them. Richard Riley, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Hotels, said that tourism is “exceptionally heavy on resources and development” and, as a result, these industry leaders “have a role in the protection of biodiversity.” His solution, though, wasn’t close to what environmentalists believe is necessary. Riley’s answer was to train his employees to reduce energy use, and reduce the impact of tourism on climate change. Not particularly radical, especially for a country that is overwhelmed by water bottles discarded by the millions.
Richard F. Smith, an engineer and chair of carbon-critical buildings for the Atkins Group, an engineering and design firm in the UAE, was not so timid. He told his peers that they had to get serious. The designer of the technological breakthroughs for the Burj Al Arab Hotel, Smith said that only 10 percent of the tourism industry is committed to carbon reduction.
“If the tourism industry were a country, it would be the fifth biggest carbon emitter in the world,” he said.
No one disputed that astonishing figure.
“The learning curve is very steep and the needs of the future are always under assault from the pressures of today,” he said before recommending serious changes that included reducing travel itself—the ultimate heresy in the industry.
“A sea change in our behavior has to come,” he said, suggesting fewer vacations, travel closer to home, more video conferences, perhaps government regulation of travel. No one else at the conference recommended curtailing travel and tourism; several said it wouldn’t be necessary. Smith turned out to be something like the skunk at the picnic.
It was left to Ralf Stahl to mention the basic issue of all that water being used for tourism in the middle of the desert. His topic was artificial landscapes, like golf courses. The UAE has over a dozen championship golf courses, and Dubai has become an unlikely “golf destination” in one of the world’s driest regions. To water just one of those expanses of green grass requires the equivalent of the water consumed in one year by a city of 12,000 people. The UAE doesn’t have that volume of water so they retrieve it from the ocean and put it through desalination plants, one of the reasons why the Middle East has half of the world’s desalination plants. Environmentalists say this is a disaster in the making.
Stahl said that golf courses and all heavily irrigated landscaping have to be reimagined, if not replanted with local plants that require far less water and provide shade as well as soil treated to retain water. “The proper planting cuts water usage in half,” he said. “It makes sense for a business because it cuts cost, too.”
He proposed a carefully supervised rating system to insure that water is managed efficiently and some system of punishment if it is not.
The water problem goes beyond the difficulty of supplying enough fresh drinking water. (The UAE is also one of the biggest consumers of bottled water.) The tourism demands are overwhelming to the point of farcical. The new Iceland Water Park is 120 acres of artificial pools, slides and ‘rivers’ tied together with the theme “Let’s Freeze the Desert.” Naturally it claims to have the largest man-made waterfall in the world, the 120-foot-tall Penguin Falls, which requires 100,000 gallons of water every minute to create the fall.
Without government subsidies for water and energy, these projects wouldn’t be profitable.
• • •
I almost skipped the last session which, after a confusing beginning, brought a coda to the conference and the UAE’s contribution to the tourism industry. The panels dealt with a concept called “Emiratization.” When I first heard it, I thought the speaker was saying “amortization,” and I wondered whether you could amortize tourism the way you amortize your mortgage. “Emiratization” means convincing native Emiratis to join the workforce in all fields and become masters of their economy.
In this instance “emiratization” meant simply convincing the native Emiratis that they should work in the tourism field. Among the most pampered people in the world, many citizens of the UAE need not work. The panel concentrated on coaxing the natives into the workplace, setting up “ambassador” programs to find out what jobs most interested prospective employees, then to teach and train these locals about tourism and their native heritage.
“We receive complaints from tourists that there are no Emiratis in our hotels,” said Ghanim Al Marri, who joined Jebel Ali International Hotels in 1993, becoming the first native to work in the hospitality sector. Very few have followed him.
“We need locals in hotels who know our own style of welcome and hospitality,” he said.
Education was one of the answers to this dilemma, and the audience that morning was filled with local students studying tourism under visiting foreign instructors such as Brian King of Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. The question is, who is teaching these Emiratis their own culture and style?
The reality is discouraging. One of the biggest losers in this push toward tourism has been local culture, beginning with the Arabic language. The youth of the Emirates have been described as “linguistically rootless,” with mediocre English and bare literacy in Arabic. An early study in 2003 by the Abu Dhabi Policy Agency found that one-fourth of males and one-fifth of females were actually illiterate in Arabic, with the figures far worse among the young. Blame was assigned to all the public English of the tourism world and the foreign workers, beginning with the Asian maids who are raising the children. As the language disappears, basic Arab cultural forms and habits disappear as well.
Tourism is hollowing out the culture. For all of its outward insistence on its Arab moorings, the twin cities of the UAE are losing their moorings as they become global cities for tourists. Anthropologists have been predicting such a fate for tourist destinations for centuries. From the first field studies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, anthropologists warned that tourism was turning local culture into a commodity to entertain foreigners and that, ultimately, as foreigners demanded standard hotels, standard meals and standard comforts (including the speaking of English), that local culture would lose its authenticity and then disappear.
“The first question we ask is what effect tourism has on the culture and identity of host communities,” said Professor Carol Greenhouse, chair of Princeton University’s Department of Anthropology. “Is the culture bolstered and enhanced or is it perverted and deformed?”
She told me during an interview on campus that while tourism is now considered an essential right of the middle and leisure classes, that doesn’t remove the responsibility of understanding what they are doing to the countries they visit. “Tourism is creating a monoculture of shopping malls, hotels, karaoke bars and restaurants—a cultural fusion that is erasing native culture.”
As if to prove her point, while we were attending the Green Tourism conference, Abu Dhabi was host to the Formula One races, held near the new Ferrari World red dome “wonderland.” Besides its otherworldly racing track that skirts yacht basins so the wealthy needn’t budge from their ships, Yas Island has concert arenas and the world’s fastest roller coaster. Hotels were packed. Foreign celebrities—King Juan Carlos of Spain and Sir Richard Branson—attended and Abu Dhabi was declared “firmly on the map” of hip places for the world’s jet set.
That is the bargain that the UAE has made. In return for becoming one of the most desired tourism destinations in the world, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are now global cities with little left of their desert heritage, their environment or their hold on the future should all those foreigners leave.