Dubai - A Tale of Two Cities

Dubai - A desert paradise, or the most dangerous city on earth. Or Both. The tale you will find herein is not mine, and it’s not the story of why I was there. It is the story of Dubai’s forgotten prisoners. How they live, the inmates, the poor souls trapped within its walls. Central jail is a cold, frustrating and inhumane hell. It was my home for nine months. Like any good writer, I was fascinated by the stories of others. I soaked them up, taking notes and sketching out the book herein. Living amongst the subject material as a prisoner focuses the mind. I, the researcher, suffer, feel the pain, know the despair, and take the same risks as my subject matter. Like any decent conflict correspondent, I found myself on the front line. Dare I say Hemingway in Normandy, Hicks at Trafalgar or Cronkite in Vietnam. Did they have a choice? I would say not. Destiny is sometimes unavoidable, and life in Dubai’s penal colony is hard. I was given no choice. I write for freedom and get to writing this tale for the prisoners lost, forgotten and destroyed by an evil regime. I write for those who cannot leave and the many who will join them unless there is a change. Change will only happen if people start to make ethical destination choices for tourism, commerce and work. I watched BBC World News on the inside, and I saw the ‘Black Lives Matter’ gain momentum. I laughed at the hypocrisy around me. I was in a place where lives don’t matter, and the black ones even less. Access to privileges and comfort in central jail and the City of Dubai is based on the passport you hold and your skin colour. Black is definitely the bottom of that ladder. Slavery is legal in the UAE, and all accept that black comes last. They are officially decreed as below the Filipino. In Dubai, that’s about as low as you can go. Dubai is Two Cities, the one they sell you and the one you’ll find herein. And yet, I would return tomorrow and live there, for I had a good life. As do so many ex-pats. It is not the city at fault. It is the man at the top, he is the city, and he has two faces. The management structure is a narrow, top-down vertical system. Power is absolute. Sheikh Mohammed knows everything that goes on of significance and insignificance. My life has been a peripatetic one, for I have travelled far and wide, seen many things, just and unjust. And never expected life to be fair. I did, however, expect the unfairness when I found it to be predictable and acceptable to a rational mind. I have loved my life in Dubai. And I enjoyed most of it most of the time. I bought the illusion the city does so well. And now herein, I would never utter a single word of bitterness. I write a simple story of fact, the facts hidden from you. I am glad of the opportunity to write about what I saw. It is, as I always suspected and much worse. I sold my soul when I spent the Sheikh’s Dirham. In years to come, some may pontificate on the words I have written. By then, the world will have dealt with the history of Dubai. The truth always finds its ugly way to the surface. Where will you have stood on the matter? How will history record your position? The judicial system is of the UAE, and more specifically, Dubai is Dickensian. I found myself in a world of contradiction. A city from a Dickens tale, with a debtors’ jail and draconian punishment designed to crush a man’s soul and rinse him clean. It is the best of cities, it is the worst of cities, it is the age of tolerance, it is the age of intolerance, it is the epoch of freedom, it is the epoch of injustice, it is the season of light, it is the season of darkness, it is a city of hope, it is a city of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to the beach, we were all going to jail — in short, one Dubai was so far like the other Dubai that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.