Dubai and Modern Slavery
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/08/middleeast.construction
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- iloveravi
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Great article about the labor that is building most glitzy over-the-top city on earth.
As it turns out, it seems it is a corrupt as you'd expect from big business. The workers are lied to, tricked and worked to the bone while living in squalor or on the street.
A very good article.
Snippet:
One evening in Abu Dhabi, I have dinner with my friend Ali, a charming Iraqi engineer whom I have known for two decades. After the meal, as his wife serves saffron-flavoured tea, he pushes back his chair and lights a cigar. We talk about stock markets, investment and the Middle East, and then the issue of race comes up.
"We will never use the new metro if it's not segregated," he tells me, referring to the state-of-the-art underground system being built in neighbouring Dubai. "We will never sit next to Indians and Pakistanis with their smell," his wife explains.
Not for the first time, I am told that while the immigrant workers are living in appalling conditions, they would be even worse off back home - as if poverty in one place can justify exploitation in the other.
"We need slaves," my friend says. "We need slaves to build monuments. Look who built the pyramids - they were slaves."
Sharla Musabih, a human rights campaigner who runs the City of Hope shelter for abused women, is familiar with such sentiments. "Once you get rich on the back of the poor," she says, "it's not easy to let go of that lifestyle. They are devaluing human beings," she says. "The workers might eat once a day back home, but they have their family around them, they have respect. They are not asking for a room in a hotel - all they are asking for is respect for their humanity."
As it turns out, it seems it is a corrupt as you'd expect from big business. The workers are lied to, tricked and worked to the bone while living in squalor or on the street.
A very good article.
Snippet:
One evening in Abu Dhabi, I have dinner with my friend Ali, a charming Iraqi engineer whom I have known for two decades. After the meal, as his wife serves saffron-flavoured tea, he pushes back his chair and lights a cigar. We talk about stock markets, investment and the Middle East, and then the issue of race comes up.
"We will never use the new metro if it's not segregated," he tells me, referring to the state-of-the-art underground system being built in neighbouring Dubai. "We will never sit next to Indians and Pakistanis with their smell," his wife explains.
Not for the first time, I am told that while the immigrant workers are living in appalling conditions, they would be even worse off back home - as if poverty in one place can justify exploitation in the other.
"We need slaves," my friend says. "We need slaves to build monuments. Look who built the pyramids - they were slaves."
Sharla Musabih, a human rights campaigner who runs the City of Hope shelter for abused women, is familiar with such sentiments. "Once you get rich on the back of the poor," she says, "it's not easy to let go of that lifestyle. They are devaluing human beings," she says. "The workers might eat once a day back home, but they have their family around them, they have respect. They are not asking for a room in a hotel - all they are asking for is respect for their humanity."
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bakpa79
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Maybe that's also why they've done some much with all that oil revenue. It's really economical to build paradise on blood, flesh and bone of slave labor.
- 3 years ago
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bakpa79
