Page 201 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

198 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

airport costing $384 million, capable of handling twenty-two wide-bodied jet
aircraft at one time. Eventually, so it is said, Jabal Ali will become a mighty

powerhouse of industry and commerce, with a population of half-a-million
souls. What is perhaps of rather more significance than all this fanfaronade is
that Rashid has already borrowed from abroad (mainly between 1967 and
1977) a total of $2,000 million to finance Dubai’s expansion. Most of this
debt is still outstanding and it requires $100 million per annum to service it.
By 1981 the annual charges will have risen to $466 million. If Rashid presses
ahead with the Jabal Ali scheme, therefore, he will have to increase his borrow­

ings abroad or his oil revenue, or both. Alternatively, he will have to regain
some of his old astuteness and trim his sails to the winds of economic
sanity.
Down the coast at Abu Dhabi the hypermania is even more marked, being
aggravated by a long-smouldering rivalry between the ruling families of Abu

Dhabi and Dubai. Soon after his accession in 1966, the ruler of Abu Dhabi,
Shaikh Zayid ibn Sultan Al Nihayan, ordered the construction of a port, so as
to avoid having to ship Abu Dhabi’s imports through Dubai. The port was
completed and then expanded, both times at staggering cost, since the natural
conditions of the coastline are not as favourable to harbour construction as they
are, comparatively speaking, at Dubai. Abu Dhabi town, which in the early
1960s possessed barely a dozen substantial buildings, has expanded into a kind

of Arabian Torremolinos, a bloated, disordered mass of architectural vul­
garities and grotesqueries, which it would take a sturdy pen and even stronger
nerves merely to enumerate. Such now is Abu Dhabi’s importance as the
capital of the UAE and a financial centre of the world that the international
airport opened in 1970 is now deemed insufficient for its needs, and a second

airport, modelled on the lines of Charles de Gaulle airport at Roissy, is now
being built at a cost of $200 million. Yet another international airport, costing
$75 million, is planned for the town of al-Ain, a hundred miles inland in the
Buraimi oasis.
Al-Ain, where Zayid spent most of his life before becoming ruler, has, along
with the other Abu Dhabi villages in the Buraimi oasis, had money lavished

upon it out of all proportion to the size of its original population, with the
inevitable result that its population has now swollen out of all recognition, as
tribesmen from near and far and Uitlanders of every description have swarmed
in to enjoy the cornucopia. Apart from the usual complement of houses,
schools, mosques, paved roads, piped water and abundant electricity, the
al-Ain scene is now graced by the presence of a ‘university’, the impulse for

which would seem to have been yearnings of the kind that lay behind the
creation of the Qatar ‘national museum’. There are limits, however, to the
development of al-Ain as anything more than an oasis town, albeit the centre of

Abu Dhabi’s cultural efflorescence.
To match, or preferably eclipse, Rashid’s ambitious plans for Jabal Ah,