City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (36 page)

Since the 2006 trafficking law took effect, a few cases have filtered into Dubai’s courts. Those on trial didn’t appear to be linchpins of the trade. An Indian housemaid and driver were charged with trafficking in 2007 after trying to sell an Indonesian woman to a policeman for $1,200. They’d already forced her into prostitution. In another case, police arrested a pair of Indian men trying to sell two maids, one Indian and one Bangladeshi, for $1,250 each. They, too, had already forced the two women into the sex industry.
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But in December 2008, authorities arrested eight Emiratis, some of whom worked as undercover policemen, and charged them under the trafficking law. The suspects had been
taking payments from brothels, apparently where trafficked women had been forced to work.
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Gargash defends the small number of prosecutions as a good start, since the cases are so hard to assemble. “We want to get to twenty or thirty a year, which under the trafficking law is quite a respectable number.”

The UAE’s 2007 report on human trafficking says “at least 10” trafficking cases had been registered, five of which resulted in convictions. Nearly four hundred prostitutes were arrested in 2007 and two brothels shuttered. And “several others are under constant surveillance for any trace of illegal activity.” The report gives no information on convicted traffickers.

Overall, Gargash seems less concerned with ending human tragedies than improving the UAE’s ranking in the State Department’s reports, and thereby its image. “I don’t think it’s negative on us that we have a human trafficking problem. It’d be negative if we didn’t do anything about it,” he says. “Is our strategy ending the problem? No, it’s not. But our strategy is impacting positively.”

Why is Dubai the Middle East’s capital of prostitution? One reason is sheer demand: There aren’t enough women to go around. The city is more than 75 percent male. “The way the city is structured provides the basis and condition for prostitution,” says Dubai sociologist Rima Sabban. “There is a huge market for it. I don’t know how much the government can do.”

Dubai is also a business and convention hub. The multiethnic smorgasbord of prostitutes gives the city’s nightlife a bit of added excitement. A Google search turns up chat sites describing Dubai’s sex tourism sector: the best brothels and hooker bars, with sex prices listed by ethnicity.

Prostitution is also an unspoken part of Dubai’s atmosphere of tolerance, which the city uses to lure skilled expatriates. The sex business may offend Muslim sensibilities, but it’s part of a policy that underpins the economy. The authorities put up with it. “There must be some level of tolerance,” Sabban says. “But how far can you stretch tolerance?”

Every few years when the sex market spills into full view, the police crack down and it slinks back into the dark. This happened in 2007
when Dubai’s biggest brothel, the infamous Cyclone, closed down. The Cyclone had been getting too big an international reputation, appearing in a
Vanity Fair
article and then, after it closed, featuring in the 2008 movie
Body of Lies
, with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. Once I unwisely uttered the word “cyclone” in a taxi. I was speaking about the impending arrival of the 2007 storm Cyclone Gonu, but the cab driver slammed on the brakes and started into a U-turn. “You want to go to Cyclone?” he asked.

Vice cleanups have been a Dubai staple for generations. There was a crackdown on hookers in Deira in 1936, when Sheikh Saeed’s
wali
forced them to get married or leave town.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, Iranian prostitutes worked under two madams, one who controlled business in Bur Dubai and another who ran the Deira red-light district around Nasser Square, now Baniyas Square. One old-timer who asked to remain anonymous remembers that things got so bad that Sheikh Rashid ordered hookers rounded up and deported. The crackdown triggered a run on the local bank.

“The British bank nearly went bust,” he says with a windy guffaw. “They didn’t have the money to pay all the girls off when they came for their savings.”

THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE

DUBAI’S NEW WEALTH
has transformed the city, extended lives, erased illiteracy and malnutrition. It’s also trashed the environment. In the 1950s, Dubaians lived below their ecological means, using virtually no energy, practicing sustainable fishing, and emitting hardly a trace of carbon dioxide. Since then, their ecological footprint has grown alongside their wealth.

By 2006, UAE residents, with their indoor ski slope, monster 4×4s, and chilled swimming pools, had become the world’s most rapacious consumers of energy and producers of greenhouse gas, burning through even more of the earth’s resources than the average American.

Energy consumption in the Emirates runs high for many of the same reasons found in the United States: a feeling that the good life requires huge air-conditioned houses and cars, and disdain for public transportation. The UAE produces next to nothing, so food and other staples have to be shipped in. The world has recognized that America’s way of life can’t be supported much longer. But somehow Dubai didn’t get the message.

In 2008, the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Report pegged the UAE’s ecological footprint at 9.5 global hectares per person,
number one in the world. That was higher than America’s 9.4 hectares (number two), and more than triple the global average of 2.7.
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Britain’s footprint was 5.3 hectares. Nearby Yemen, a poor country with little oil, used less than a tenth of the UAE’s resources. Yemen’s footprint was 0.9 hectares per person.

The report suggests that if every person in the world devoured as much as those in the UAE and the United States, four and a half planets would be needed to provide the resources. The WWF warned that the UAE could be one of the worst hit by its own contributions to global warming. Rising seas are a stark thought given the low-lying islands Dubai just built.

Residents of the UAE and Dubai consume more water and electricity and produce more waste per capita than nearly anyone on the planet.
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Water use is particularly galling. The UAE’s consumption, at 145 gallons per person, per day, is the highest in the world—beating America’s 128 daily gallons and Canada’s 112. But those countries have water. The UAE’s supplies are among the world’s lowest. By contrast, the average person in nearby Jordan uses 22 gallons per day.
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The fact that Dubaians squander so much water means the ozone layer takes a big hit. Some 80 percent of the city’s water is desalinated, made by boiling seawater and separating steam from briny waste. This process burns prodigious amounts of carbon-spewing fossil fuel. The brine gets dumped back into the Gulf, further upping the salinity of one of the world’s saltiest seas. Dubai encourages overuse by giving the water away, or selling it below cost.

“Environmental awareness in all Gulf countries is very low. That’s especially true in Dubai,” says David Aubrey, the fifty-eight-year-old chairman of the Woods Hole Group, a Massachusetts-based consultancy on the aquatic environment. Aubrey has done some work in Dubai, but more often was told that his expertise wasn’t needed.
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When Dubai took off in the late 1990s, no one stood up for the environment. Aubrey believes that a deliberate policy at the highest level favored development at all costs, with no consideration for sustainability. Developers saw that Sheikh Mohammed’s personal projects took no notice of the environment, so theirs didn’t either. “When the top guy in the country is a major investor and major player, people get away with a lot in his name,” Aubrey says.

Every aspect of Dubai’s development is contributing to its world-beating
carbon footprint: building design, choice of materials, neighborhood layout, and city planning. All of it is based on cheap energy and government-subsidized electricity. Energy demand is out of control, bizarrely outstripping supply in a producer country.

“They are repeating the stupid mistakes of the West,” says Eckart Woertz, a German economist at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. “You could argue that you shouldn’t build a city for five million people in the desert. You could say, ‘Okay, they could build solar power stations.’ But there is the thinking that, ‘No, we want it this way.’ It’s like the whole Kyoto debate. ‘It’s our right to waste energy like there’s no tomorrow. You did it yesterday.’”
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In 2007, Aubrey tried to interest Dubai in a sustainability master plan. The plan would crunch numbers and follow trends to paint a picture of where the city was headed. That way, city fathers could examine options for reining in pollution and energy use. But the authorities Aubrey visited at Dubai Municipality and The Executive Office saw his scheme as damning the city they’d already built.

“I was immediately told, ‘That’s not going to happen,’” he said. “They said ‘What’s wrong with what we’ve done? Everything we’ve done is fine.’ I started to mention the adverse impacts of some of their projects and the interview was over. It was very clear that I was not to talk about those things. If a sustainability road map would imply there’s anything less than perfection in the development so far, then it would get nowhere.”

It didn’t have to be this way. Dubai came of age after 2002, by which time it was clear that burning fossil fuel was warming the earth and the era of cheap oil was ending. With a bit of forethought, Dubai could have built a sustainable city, that would have boosted property values and prestige.

Mathis Wackernagel is the Swiss engineer who created the concept of the ecological footprint in his PhD dissertation. He now heads the Global Footprint Network in Oakland, California, a nonprofit that tallies the carbon emissions of most countries. His reports show exactly who is living furthest beyond the biosphere’s means of supporting them.

Wackernagel calls Dubai’s shimmering skyscrapers “monuments to the past.” Their rapacious electricity needs will be outmoded by rising energy costs. “Those will be abandoned pretty soon,” he says. He, too, is advising the UAE government on cutting its world-beating carbon footprint. Thus far, it’s not working.

Dubai’s haste to build and sell has combined two wasteful traits. First are the suburbs of big, energy-inefficient houses that can only be reached by private cars. Second are the dense districts of high-rise apartment towers. The glassed-in towers are passive collectors of solar energy. If Dubai was a cool place, the free heat would be welcome. Here it means residents need to crank up the air-conditioning. In summer, as much as 85 percent of Dubai’s power generation is used for air-conditioning, the actual cost of which is shrouded in subsidies.
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Towers waste energy in other ways. “You need to pump water half a mile into the sky to flush a toilet,” Wackernagel says. “And they don’t even have shading in front of the windows. Totally weird.”
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If you split the difference between Dubai’s glass towers and its concrete McMansions, you get an urban scale that needs much less energy. Wackernagel points to Paris as an efficient cityscape. It’s got five-story walkups that don’t need elevators or water pumps. Buildings use less heating and cooling because there is little surface compared with volume. Population density allows for local shopping districts and effective public transportation, so people don’t need cars. France’s ecological footprint is 4.9 hectares per person.

Less hurried Abu Dhabi contrasts with Dubai. Residents in the UAE capital probably pollute as much as Dubaians. But their leaders have put thought to the future, seeking ways to cut their emissions. The city plans to produce 7 percent of its power from renewable sources—mainly solar—by 2020.
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It is Abu Dhabi’s Masdar initiative that has gotten the most attention. Masdar is a $22 billion city that will rely entirely on renewable power. Masdar’s designers, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say the city’s 50,000 residents and the 40,000 workers in its 1,500 businesses will produce zero waste or carbon emissions. The businesses, in fact, will focus on green technology. Cars will be replaced by “personal rapid transit” pods. Even the treadmills at the gyms are supposed to generate energy rather than burn it. If it comes true, Wackernagel believes a home in Masdar City will hold its value longer than one in a Dubai tower.