Escape From the Gilded Cage: Why Royals and Expats Are Fleeing Dubai
By Richard Spencer, The Australian
10 September 19
It's hard to escape notice in Dubai, city of 1000 selfies and 10,000
closed-circuit TV cameras. That is how a lot of people want it: it is a city
that attracts people who are visible, or who want to become visible, or who
have something to sell, including often themselves. At the exclusive end, it
is a world centre of the diamond market, and what is more for show than
diamonds? At the other, public relations companies set up "paparazzi" shots
of sports stars who want to be pictured gambolling with their wives and
children in five-star hotel swimming pools to counter some tabloid story of
infidelity or marital split. (Actual paparazzi have a tougher time of it in
these parts.)
But then there are those who actually want to escape. That's where the
closed-circuit cameras come in. "They are on every corner of Dubai. I can
assure you, we have the whole city covered," a Dubai police chief, Lt
Colonel Nasser Ibrahim Kazim, boasted to a slightly startled journalist a
few years ago. He was talking about a jewellery thief who had been tracked
on video from start to finish as he made his way across the city with $12
million worth of gems before being arrested.
But it was something of a wake-up call to the rest of the population, too,
especially its nearly three million expats, many of whom - at least the
wealthier westerners - often live their day-to-day lives rather blithely.
"We have expanded our -systems and we have set up surveillance cameras in
any new area that has been developed," Kazim went on. The cameras are wired
up to facial -recognition technology. From the airport to the mall, as one
handy phrase has it, you are never out of sight from the moment you arrive
till the moment you leave, and someone always knows where you are. There are
3000 cameras in Dubai airport alone, apparently.
Spare a thought, then, for Dubai's reluctant royal princesses, the ones who
have all the gems they could possibly want but still seem as eager as
thieves to make their getaway. Every couple of years a big story comes up
about Dubai that makes everyone gawp at the city, sometimes for good, often
for glitz - Biggest mall! Tallest building! -Maddest offshore residential
complex! - and sometimes for bad. The princesses fall into the latter
category, and though this year's story came out of the blue, it had been
brewing for some time.
It was Princess Haya bint al-Hussein who -managed to escape, and more
secrets may spill out from there. The wife of Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed
bin Rashid al-Maktoum, she is a princess twice over - by marriage and by
birth, as daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan. The reason her sudden
arrival in London, armed with Britain's most sought-after divorce lawyer,
Fiona Shackleton, came out of the blue was because it had seemed that hers
was a fairytale marriage.
While her husband, Sheikh Mohammed, with his love of horses, the desert and
Arabic poetry, represented the often forgotten traditional side of Dubai
life, the glamorous, privately educated, fashion-conscious princess
represented what it had become: modern, ambitious, confident. In appearance,
she often resembled more an expat housewife of the posher variety, the ones
found lunching in vegan juice bars in the beachside -suburb of Jumeirah,
than a regular Gulf consort. Though to be fair, we don't really know what a
regular Gulf consort looks like, since most royal wives are never seen in
public.
Then one day, probably in March, it was over. We still do not know why this
was, or how Princess Haya made her run for it, through the guarded palace
corridors, along Dubai's main thoroughfare, Sheikh Zayed Road, an eight-lane
river of Toyota Land Cruisers and Maseratis with sharp-topped steel
skyscrapers lining the banks, to the intensively policed airport. It is
widely assumed that if, as reported, she travelled to London via Germany, it
was to establish her claim to asylum, in some sense of the term, making her
flight -officially known to non-British authorities. Britain has historic
ties and familial relations with the Maktoum family, and it is widely
thought it allowed Princess Haya's stepdaughter, Sheikha Shamsa, 18 years
old at the time, to be kidnapped back to Dubai in 2000. However, we do not
know this for sure; we do not know exactly how and when Princess Haya left,
if Sheikh Mohammed knew about it, or whether he would have stopped her
leaving even if he had the opportunity. It is one thing for him to have
asserted his rights over his daughters such as Sheikha Shamsa, rights that
Gulf tradition at least gives him; another to hold his wife captive, a wife
moreover with a considerably longer royal heritage than his own. Princess
Haya, a member of Jordan's Hashemite dynasty, is a direct descendant of the
Prophet Mohammed.
Nevertheless, escape is how it is being seen, and if Sheikh Mo, as he is
irreverently known in Dubai, is being traduced in the telling, he has only
himself to blame. For escaping Dubai has become a meme over the 13 years
that he has run the emirate. There was Sheikha Shamsa, who ran away from the
family estate in Surrey, England, rather than return to Dubai, but was found
at a Cambridge pub a few days later by the sheikh's security entourage,
reportedly bundled into a car and stuck on a private jet back home. Then
last year Sheikha Shamsa's full sister, Sheikha Latifa, by one of Sheikh
Mohammed's "minor" wives, made an even more dramatic escape, driving across
the desert to Oman, taking a ride out to the yacht of a French former secret
service agent who had offered to help, and then sailing across the Indian
Ocean. As with Shamsa, it was not to be. This time it was India that came to
Sheikh Mohammed's aid, its navy joining forces with the Emiratis to board
the yacht and take all on board captive. Seemingly, no one has seen either
of the sisters in public since they were reportedly returned to Dubai.
Why do so many people want to escape from Dubai? For it is not just royals.
When the -financial crisis struck the city in 2009, expats lost their jobs
and, overloaded with the cheap debt that paid for their luxury lifestyle,
headed straight for the airport - aware that, in Dubai, debtors' prison was
still very much a real prospect. Their BMWs and sports cars were famously
left to gather dust in the car park until the hire--purchase companies towed
them away.
Anyone who has lived in Dubai, as I did for three years, understands why
they did so. "You always feel things could go very badly wrong in Dubai, at
any time, and you wonder how you would get out," says one woman who lived
there for six years in her 20s. "I had the time of my life there," she says
- but everyone knows there's some truth to the grim stories.
In my time there as a foreign correspondent, I met some of the people who
didn't make it. One Briton was living on the streets (secretly - vagrancy is
not allowed), victim of a classic Dubai trap. He'd swapped jobs and gone
home for a few weeks before starting with his new employer, unaware of a
Dubai practice whereby your bank account, which is tied to your employment,
is instantly -frozen if your pay stops going in. Once frozen, his automatic
credit card payments stopped, and he was in default. This caused problems
with his car loan, and by the time he returned to Dubai a request had been
lodged at the airport to seize his passport. Without his passport, he could
not take up his new job and resume his repayments. It took nearly a year
before a charity stepped in to give him a loan, by which time he was
sleeping on park benches. Others - particularly, it has to be said,
non-Europeans - simply go to jail, many languishing for years, unable to pay
their way out.
Dubai is, though, a more complex story than that. Life is often lived on the
edge in countries where the rule of law has not kept up with social and
economic development (China springs to mind) and those who do not live
defensively often live high before a fall. But a lot of people leave -simply
because so many want to live there in the first place. Dubai's population 50
years ago was 59,000. Today's three million are 85 per cent foreigners who
come for the jobs, the opportunity to strike it rich or, in the case of
residents from other Arab states, because it is one of the few
well-functioning places in which they can live and raise a family. I was
living in Dubai when Egypt and Libya rose up against their crusty dictators
and collapsing economies. When I asked Libyans what kind of society they
wanted, a few said democracy, a few said Islam, but a lot just said,
"Dubai".
Other countries in the Gulf are rich, of course, and employ foreigners, but
the jobs are menial. In Dubai, you can work for proper companies, learning
real skills: skilled construction jobs, banking, trade, retail, public
relations. You can even set up your own business. Sure, there's no
democracy, and Arabs are as aware as middle-class expats that there is a
tackiness to the place, but that is not the steepest price to pay for a
salary. The UAE's -average income was $US44,000 last year. In -Libya's best
year before the revolution, it was $12,000 - and it has more oil than Dubai.
"In Dubai, I just had the opportunities I couldn't see my friends getting,"
my young interviewee says. In Dubai, she bought a Porsche, partied and dined
out, and had a job that opened doors to the future. "I knew there was a
darker side," she says - the labour camps in the desert, where workers from
the subcontinent lived in sometimes atrocious conditions, the lack of free
speech, the debtors' prisons. But she figured nowhere was perfect.
That remains the case today. "As expats, you live in a little bubble," says
another woman who, like the first, asks to remain anonymous in case she ever
goes back. "It's not until you leave that you look back and think, 'Every
time I went in and out, my picture was being taken. They have my
fingerprints. You can't do anything without handing over your ID.' That's
part of the way Dubai operated - it was very regimented, which was why
everything worked, but I realised that the government were in control of
everything." Still, she adds, there are worse things in expat life than
proper roads, uninterrupted electricity supplies and clean and safe
surroundings. "Life was easier there than anywhere else we lived."
The target market for Dubai's growth is the aspiring middle classes, be they
Arab or from anywhere else, for whom life in a villa on a compound with its
own private primary school, golf course and gym is a step up in life. This
does, though, lead to a sense of alienation. Transience is its essence;
relationships are functional. Everyone wants to make enough money for a
house deposit back home. No foreigner can gain permanent residency, as
permission to stay is entirely tied to your job, so there is no point in
becoming too attached, even if some families are there for generations.
None of my friends wanted for the trappings of expat life and no doubt for
Princess Haya, the material side of life was beyond my humble imaginings.
But while Sheikh Mohammed is one of the world's richest men, being married
to him put her at the epicentre of Dubai's oddness, where its traditions and
its modernity - its outward drive and its closed-off introspection - meet so
uncomfortably.
Like most foreigners, I never made friends with an Emirati in my time there.
My wife and I tried hard with some Emirati neighbours, but were met with
polite bafflement. A Briton who lived there in the early days told me it
wasn't always like this, but that the influx from outside had turned the
locals in on themselves, into high-walled villas. This will have been as
true for Princess Haya as anyone. In Britain, she and the sheikh lived the
life of an -ordinary albeit aristocratic western couple with their children
in Dalham Hall, a stately home near their Godolphin stables in Newmarket.
But in Dubai, she lived separately with her children, as do all of Sheikh
Mohammed's wives.
Meanwhile, the Dubai show goes on. My Saudi friend, a multi-millionaire
businessman, is thinking of leaving. The real estate mania and the lack of
responsiveness of an autocratic government are starting to get him down. The
mistakes that led to the 2009 crash have simply been repeated, he says.
This is what journalists at the time predicted. In his first and last majlis
(meeting) for international journalists, in late 2009, Sheikh Mohammed
scowled as we quizzed him about economic mismanagement, environmental
sustainability and democratic accountability. It was very unlike the
traditional niceties of the conventional majlis of notables that is the core
of governance, what passes for consultation, in the Gulf states. I think he
simply could not understand us: how could we carp, when he had built so
much, made so many fortunes, when Dubai was the name on everybody's lips?
Two months later, he was forced to go to oil-rich Abu Dhabi for a $20
billion debt bailout. It was an abject humiliation, and it can still be seen
on his face, many believe. He seems noticeably angrier, less confident, more
suspicious. Four days into the following new year, an enormous celebration
was held for the opening of his pride and joy, the world's tallest building,
the Burj Dubai, a -needle full of empty offices and luxury apartments
thrusting 828m into the sky. As the fireworks popped, the television screens
told us it had been renamed the Burj Khalifa, after the ruler of Abu Dhabi.
The bailout, it appeared, came in return for a public restoration of the
true hierarchy of the United Arab Emirates. The cameras found Sheikh
Mohammed's face, locked in a silent fury.
My family and friends watched the fun from the roof of our villa. One
friend, Kim, did not watch with us. That was the day she had chosen to dump
the bling and head for the airport and home. "I had a T-shirt, jeans and my
passport," she says. "I left my fancy life behind because I was empty. And
for me, Burj Khalifa was the Tower of Babel."
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