Dubai gets brutalized

an apartement of 100 sq. meters with 2 bedroom, low quality furnished, in doha for 2200 US$/MONTH!!! for what? for the forests, rivers and cool breeze from the snowy mountains? offer v/s demand they say

we're in a desert for god sake. and when the offer is greater than demand everything falls down.

I agree that these are all saliant points, Fubar. There was some commentary that seemed a bit unfair though.

Articles like these often paint the expat community of the Gulf States rather negatively. Jeremy Clarkson wrote one recently where he referred to the kind of sad losers that have to come to the Gulf to work, the insinuation being that we are not up to it back at home.

I am sure that we are not all greedy, racist and lazy with an appetite for Russian hookers... Hopefully! On the contrary, most expats I know are here to save a bit of money, maybe make a dent in their mortgage back home and provide security for themselves and their family. I think most of us are only too well aware of the shortcomings of the place in which we live but we hope that things improve for those people who have built so much of these countries for such little reward.

I started reading it thinking that the author just had an axe to grind against Dubai, but most of his observations were accurate.

You might not like his tone when talking about the plight of laborers, the abundance of prostitutes, the problems with the legal system, but the problems are real.

The coda on the end was particularly insightful:

Politics and human rights

1 No suffrage

2 Political parties illegal

3 Freedom of association and expression curtailed

The UAE refuses to sign the following treaties:

4 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

5 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

6 Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families

7 Convention against Torture

My first reaction as I was reading was that he author seemed to really have it in for this part of the world and some points are rather unfair. My wife (being ex Qatar Airways flight crew) was indignant at the suggestion that a lot of flight attendants equals lots of sex, presumably meaning they are all sluts.

However, many of the criticisms are well-founded and of course don't just apply to Dubai. There are plenty of things that need to be fixed in order for this region to fulfill its potential. The treatment of migrant workers in particular is a topic that I know many here find abhorrent.

We can all relate to this gem:

He told me the whole process had been devastating, not least having to apologise to the idiot driver who was, as bad luck would have it, a UAE police official. “I am fed up with foreigners not respecting the rules and our culture,” the puffed-up medieval official told the local Arab media later. You can tell a lot about a country from a quick look at its policemen going about their business. In Dubai they appear strutting, arrogant and faintly ludicrous, the sort of policemen you might have seen in a pre-war Third World fascist theocracy. That is not too far removed from a description of Dubai today.

Ever since Dubai put a PR firm on a retainer to stop naughty newspapers writing this sort of thing, these stories have become more common.

Rather than paying for spin doctors to make things *look* okay, why not just address the problem and fix things?

I believe it is a fair judgement on what's really going on up there.

I think that's a fine description of reality. Maybe not only in the emirates:

"The British expats I spoke to believed, without exception, that the Emiratis are utterly useless, corrupt and indolent, and, according to several, some British managers are leaving rather than abide by a new law that requires them to employ a certain percentage of Arabs on every job. They’re simply not up to it, they say. As it is, the locals make up less than one-fifth of the total UAE population, the westerners roughly half that amount. The majority population in Dubai is the criminally low-paid, enchained, abused, dispossessed peasantry from south Asia."

...it's sad but had to happen due to the weak foundation on which the entire economy was built.

Life is Beautiful...Indeed!