I hope that’s the last time I get stuck in Dubai.
This past Sunday, I boarded a plane with ten other election monitors from Democracy International (including my PPI colleague Mike Signer) to head to Kabul and serve as monitors for the second round of Afghanistan’s presidential elections.
We never made it.
Before boarding the flight, we knew that Abdullah Abdullah — incumbent President Hamid Karzai’s main challenger — planned to boycott the election. We were under the impression that Abdullah’s boycott was unofficial, meaning that his name would still be on the ballot and that the election would proceed as a formality. But there was still reason to go — any election should be monitored for fraud, even when there’s only one active candidate.
Somewhere over Eastern Europe, however, we learned that Karzai had been declared the victor. Rather than risk further violence, expense, and logistical complications en route to a pre-determined outcome, the election’s cancellation was understandable, if disappointing.
However, that still left us several hours from Dubai, our transfer city. After being offered the unappetizing possibility of immediately jumping on a return flight to DC, our weary team came to grips with the situation.
“So what’s Dubai like?” I asked the group, not knowing much about my surroundings and anticipating that I had stumbled upon a short vacation in the Middle East. I forget who said it but, “It’s like Vegas but without the gambling and booze,” stuck out. And so it was.
Dubai is a city of contradictions piled on top of one another. It has glitz and glamour: towering skyscrapers, the world’s only seven-star hotel, an indoor ski slope, and a brand new metro system. Oil money, right? Nope. Dubai isn’t actually rich — petro-dollars only flow to Dubai’s “big brother” in the south, Abu Dhabi. Dubai adheres to a more Costner-ian vision: build it and they will come. And build it the sheiks did, all with highly leveraged debt. The Emirate’s business plan is predicated on the success of the companies that invest in Dubai.
And this house of cards is starting to crumble as world’s financial sand shifts beneath its feet: real estate prices are dropping fast as international firms search for efficient investments.
The statistic that is most striking is tourism, down 60 percent this year. Why would it affect Dubai so harshly when other areas, though suffering, are muddling through? As far as I can tell, it’s because Dubai lacks an intellectual or cultural soul. In the race to construct the world’s largest X, they forgot to construct anything actually worthwhile, like a university, a museum, or cultural center. The sheiks seem to have recognized the deficit, but haven’t come up with an original idea — the planned museum is apparently a copy of the Louvre in Paris, and the new opera house mimics Sydney’s.
After two days, I understood why tourists had abandoned Dubai — I could spend a month marveling at Paris’ diverse cultural tapestry, but couldn’t muster a third day just to stick around for the indoor roller coaster at the Dubai Mall (the largest in the world, if you’re keeping score).
I was surprised to learn on my second morning that I had apparently observed an election during my diverted trip. I opened my courtesy copy of Gulf News to find that Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed had been re-elected to a five-year term as president of the UAE. Mind you, I didn’t see any campaign posters about, but that may be due to the rather limited electorate: turns out you have to be a ruler of one of UAE’s seven Emirates to have a vote.
If he had one, I imagine Sheikh Khalifa’s platform on domestic issues would have raised some eyebrows. For example, despite legal adherence to a strict Islamic code, it’s easy to buy alcohol provided the establishment is foreign-owned (which is 85 percent of the city) and you’re willing to pay the 50-percent sin tax. But if you want to buy, say, a bottle of wine for your home, you can’t do that at any corner store; those places are a 45-minute drive into the desert and you need a personal alcohol license. You can’t get one if you’re Muslim, of course, but no one checked my friend Mohammed for his as he sucked down a double vodka Redbull at the Calabar.
If you’re caught publicly intoxicated, then it’s curtains. I heard the story of a French girl who was rear-ended as she drove home a 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning after a night of carousing. Despite the fact that she was the victim, the police breathalyzed her and found her blood alcohol content to be a miniscule 0.009 BAC – but still in excess of the strict zero-tolerance law. Her punishment was six months in jail, followed by deportation.
But that’s Dubai — you can get away with anything unless you’re unlucky enough to be caught. It meshes nicely with Dubai’s motto: “What’s good for business is good for Dubai.” True enough.
