Looking Past Dubai’s Fancy Exterior: The Hidden Side Of The City Of Gold

Dubai is well known as a city of wealth and beauty. It is often referred to as a city of dreams, with towering skyscrapers, luxurious shopping malls, ports, beaches, and an extremely lavish lifestyle.

About thirty years ago, almost all of Dubai was a desert. Only tumbleweeds, cactuses, and scorpions occupied the desert lands. The downtown, however, had traces of the town Dubai used to be.

Dubai was seized by the British Empire in 1971. The town allied with the six surrounding states and became the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The British became exhausted, and they left just as oil was discovered in the city. 

Compared to the neighboring Abu Dhabi, Dubai had little quantity of oil, which made the then ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Maktoum decide to use the revenue from the quantity of oil they had to build something that would last. People rushed into Dubai in huge numbers, swamping the local population. He resolved to make the desert boom. 

Foreigners from other parts of the world make up five percent of the country’s population. A city seemed to emerge from the sand dunes in three decades. They rapidly moved from the 18th century to the 21st contort in just a single generation. 

The glamorous city of Dubai was divided into three, the Expats, the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed, and then the foreign underclass, the laborers trapped in the city they built. The best place to hide anything is to hide it in plain sight, and that is what Dubai did to these supposed underclass foreigners. 

While Dubai seems dazzling and sparkling, there are ugly realities that many don’t want to address. One of the workers from India said, “To come here, they would say Dubai is heaven, and then you get here and realize it’s not like that at all.” 

The men were told they would be working 9-5 on construction projects. They believed that they would be fed and treated well with reasonable accommodation. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee that they could quickly pay off in six months. 

On getting to the airport, several workers have their passports seized and are forced to work long hours beneath an unrelenting sun for very little pay. The worker from India also had his passport taken away from him.

This worker was going to be paid only a quarter of the wage he was promised at first. He said all the workers were told that if they didn’t like the working conditions, they could go back home. 

The men panicked. Back home, their families were happy with their supposed “good fortune” and expecting money. 

When people visit Dubai, there are strict rules they must obey. For female tourists, it’s a bit more extreme.

In Sonapur, each of the rooms these workers live in is a tiny, poky concrete cell with triple-decker bunk beds, and about 11 men live in each of these cells. These overcrowded cells had lavatories in a corner, and the closeness of the toilets with piled-up belongings and holes in the ground filled with excrement make the rooms stink. 

In summer, many of them sleep on the floor or on the roof and other places where they can access some breeze. Water is being delivered to them in white containers. 

Dubai has an awful reputation for modern slavery via labor and prostitution. From the recruitment, transportation, transfer, kidnapping, and defrauding of humans, Dubai has one of the most cruel systems of human trafficking.

The poor workers need as much water as possible because most carry over 100 pounds of cement in the worst kind of heat. The sun practically causes almost every drop of water in their bodies to evaporate. They sweat so much that they can’t urinate for days or weeks. 

These workers don’t stop working even when they are sick because if they do, their wages will be reduced by their employers. And if there’s a reduction in their pay, they would be trapped in their situation even longer. 

Some workers took industrial action against their employers because they were not paid for four months. The Dubai police besieged their camps with razor-wire water cannons and blasted them out of their houses and back to work. 

These workers rely solely on their employers. They could not even grow food because the land was not suitable for farming. The expats who enjoy high incomes will most likely never experience this dark side of Dubai. 

Even though both female and male prostitution is illegal in Dubai, it still remains an alarming issue in the thriving city. It’s also surprisingly easy to find, specifically in the city’s red-light districts.

An Iranian photographer determinedly visited Sonapur, and he captured the desperate lives of these South Asian laborers who traveled to build a better future for their families. When the photographer got to Sonapur, he saw several men sitting around the courtyard in broken furniture with stray animals around them, cooking in dirty kitchens with gas cylinders in terrible conditions. 

“I did not try to get permission since the area was restricted to the public, and I was not sure I would be successful since UAE does not wish to show this part of their country,” the photographer stated. 

Most of the time, this photographer slept in his car and waited until it was dark so he could achieve his goal. He eventually got arrested and questioned by security.

The photographer hopes his series will help people think twice about what is happening around them and encourage people to help these workers. 

A British man who worked on project construction said there are huge numbers of suicides in the campsites in Sonapur and at the construction sites, but the city does not report them. 

The place where the foreigners live is called Sonapur, which is not on the map. The name means “City of Gold.” It is home to more than 150,000 workers, mostly from Pakistan, India, and China. 

A Human Rights Watch study found out about the cover-up of the true extent of workers that have passed on. They passed away from overworking, heat exhaustion, and suicide. 

Every evening, hundreds of thousands of young men who continuously build Dubai are shuttled from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland on the outskirts of Dubai, quarantined away from the city and their handiwork.

Not only are men in this predicament but women are also involved. Amongst the foreigners that go to Dubai to work, some are treated better than others. An American expat observed some European and Filipino women at work. 

The expats in Dubai like to get people to do all the work for them. There is a high demand for nannies in Dubai. At first, they preferred Filipinos because they felt they were “more intelligent than Indians.”

It is an open secret that once an expat hires a maid, they have absolute power over her. They can take her passport, which isn’t new as everyone does it. They can decide when to pay her and when or if she ever takes a break. 

The only hostel available for women in Dubai is a filthy private villa that is on the brink of being repossessed. The hostel is filled with maids that ran away from their terrible employers. 

There was a time in Dubai when oil production in the country accounted for 50% of Dubai’s gross domestic input. As of now, the government greatly relies on the revenue they make from tourism.