Page 200 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 197

does not fulfil them, the employer will almost invariably submit to the

extortion. Needless to say, in all these transactions the well-being of the
labourer, the alpha and omega of the entire system, is never given a
moment’s thought.
To what purposes have the oil revenues of Abu Dhabi and Dubai been put
over the past decade, other than in providing bread and circuses for the
indigenous inhabitants? As in the other oil states of the Gulf, there is simply no

way of knowing how much has been dissipated by personal indulgence,
extravagance or folly, how much has been corruptly siphoned off in one way or
another by the charlatans and carpet-baggers who now proliferate in the Gulf,
how much has found its way to distant financial sanctuaries or been used to
underwrite political and other activities abroad, some of them of an unsavoury
character. The visible evidence of how some of the wealth has been expended is
in the transformation of Dubai and Abu Dhabi into smaller replicas of Kuwait.

Dubai alone had known some prosperity before the coming of oil, a prosperity
based upon its function as an entrepot for the trade of Trucial Oman and the
Persian coast opposite. It had the only port deserving of the name on the
Trucial Coast, it had a vigorous merchant class (many of whom were Persians)
and the ruler, Shaikh Rashid ibn Said Al Maktum, was himself a highly astute

and successful trader. Well before the oil boom his foresight and initiative led
him to enlarge Dubai’s port facilities, so as to cope with an increased tonnage of
shipping, and to build an airport to handle international air traffic. Rashid
pursued an equally far-sighted and liberal policy towards foreign merchants,
construction firms and banks, thereby ensuring that Dubai would remain the
commercial hub and chief market-place of the coast. It has done so, to the
extent that 70 per cent of the imports into the UAE in 1976, valued at over

$8,500 million, entered through Dubai.
Of late years Rashid seems to have become the prisoner of his own reputation
for financial acumen, a victim, perhaps, of the flattery which has been rather
indiscriminately heaped upon him by Western commis voyageurs. Ignoring, or
possibly miffed by, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries’

choice of Bahrain as the site for a complex of docks to service large oil tankers,
Rashid embarked upon an even larger project of the kind at Dubai. When
completed, it will be capable of accommodating the largest tankers yet built -
and even larger ones. It remains to be seen whether there will be sufficient work
for both dock complexes to justify the cost of their construction. Not content
with what has so far been achieved, Rashid has plans for the development of a

grandiose industrial and commercial complex at Jabal Ali, to the south-west of
Dubai town. At its centre will be an aluminium smelter with an initial produc­
tive capacity of 135,000 tons per annum, a capacity which is to be increased
until the smelter, like the dry dock at Dubai, is the biggest in the world. Docks
will also be constructed at Jabal Ali on a scale designed to make the port the

argest in the Middle East. They will be complemented by a new international