City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (35 page)

WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT
the Rattle Snake and the bar is jumping. A Filipino cover band is romping through “Georgia on My Mind,” the lead singer bending backward and roaring like Otis Redding. At the worn mahogany bar, men trade pink chits for bottles of Sol beer. The decor is Old West, a hangman’s noose next to a façade labeled Court House—perhaps useful for the temporary marriages Islam allows.

There will be many temporary marriages tonight. A hundred women are on parade. The Rattle Snake, as its name implies, is a whorehouse.

Here is Elena, the pouty Romanian. Her curving figure is packed into matching white jeans and jacket, platinum-blond hair yanked back in a ponytail. She leans against the wall, smoking a thin cigarette with exaggerated impatience. Her clothes, including her silver Playboy bunny belt buckle, glow bright purple in the bar’s black light. Next to her stands Lana, twenty-four, a slinky Ukrainian in a black top of gossamer gauze. Lana sips Red Bull from a straw and flicks stray locks of hair from her face. Her overdaubed lipstick hides a cold sore. Lana is enthusiastic and blunt. “You want sex? I am ready!” Perhaps it’s because she’s only in Dubai for two weeks on a tourist visa. Or maybe it’s the Red Bull talking. She says it’ll cost me 1,500 dirhams, $400, her place or mine. When I beg
off, she says, “Why not take two girls?” and tilts her head at the Romanian, who shoots me a look of disgust.

Here is Aisulu from Kyrgyzstan. Her round face with its smiling almond eyes speaks of nomads, yurts, and snowcapped mountains. She wears a black turtleneck that highlights small breasts and a tidy figure. Every speck of lint on her sweater glows in the black light, as does her pendant of the Sanskrit letter Om. When I point it out, she tilts her head alluringly, clasps her hands in Buddhist prayer and hums, “Ohmmm” and then erupts in laughs. “Like yoga,” she says, laughing some more. Aisulu has no day job. She watches TV in an apartment in Deira, waiting for sunset. She became a prostitute after her husband died in a car crash. She supports a twelve-year-old daughter back in Bishkek.

Marketing methods vary at the Rattle Snake. Here is a young woman in a green top stretched over a push-up bra. She circles the bar over and over, gazing at men from under the mop of brown hair hiding her eyes. After fifteen minutes watching her parade, a group of beery British men waves her over. She slithers her arm along the back of one of the men, rises on her toes, and plants a kiss on his ear. Soon they are holding hands.

The Rattle Snake is part of the Metropolitan Hotel, one of the city’s oldest. When the low-rise complex opened in 1979, it was surrounded by camels grazing in the scrub. Now the Metropolitan sits in the shadow of the skyscrapers of the Business Bay district. It’s owned by Dubai’s Al Habtoor Group, a family business. The company Web site lists the VIPs who’ve spent the night, including U.S. President George H. W. Bush, Britain’s Princess Anne, actors Jean-Claude Van Damme and Omar Sharif, golfer Greg Norman, and singer La Toya Jackson. The site invites hotel guests to “dance the night away with our live entertainment at the Rattle Snake.”

Tonight’s live entertainment includes a woman with shoulder-length blond hair who struts in a skimpy black dress that looks painted on, her neckline plunging to reveal a quarter of her rounded breasts. As she jiggles past, heads turn to watch her bare back. The lateral muscles pulse as she walks. She catches my eye and turns on a dime. In a flash her greenish eyes, set a bit too far apart above her big hawk’s nose, are staring into mine. She squeezes my forearm.

“An American! Oh, wow! I love Americans,” she gushes. Her face
shines with delight. She whispers something into my ear that the band drowns out.

“How’s life?” I ask. “Do you like your work?”

“I enjoy it! Yes. Why not? It’s fun,” she says.

Her name is Rasha and she is from Iran. Not just anywhere in Iran but the Shiite holy city of Isfahan, the Paradise of Mosques, where the skyline revels in enchanting blue-green domes. Rasha has strayed further from social acceptability than anyone else in the bar. Iranian hookers are in high demand because they’ve got close cultural ties to Dubai, including their Muslim faith. “I come only for business,” she says, wagging her finger. “I stay six months, then I go home.”

She’ll have to make a few changes in her appearance before returning to Isfahan. She’ll don a modest
manteau
dress and, when the plane lands, draw her headscarf. She may even dye her hair back from its platinum blond.

I ask what she charges. “Depends,” she says. “If you are a very nice man, pay me two thousand. Otherwise, pay me fifteen hundred—four hundred dollars.”

For the past few years, the U.S. State Department labeled the UAE as one of the most lax places on earth when it comes to combating trafficking of women for prostitution, or the abuse of workers trapped in slavelike conditions.

The State Department estimated in 2006 that Dubai held some ten thousand victims of human trafficking. Women from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa sign contracts to work as maids, waitresses, and hairdressers. But when some of them arrive, employers seize their passports and force them to work, usually as prostitutes. Their suffering and exploitation hasn’t been taken seriously by the government, at least not until recently. In 2006, the UAE passed an antitrafficking law, the first in the Middle East. It named an antitrafficking czar, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash, who has sworn to fight the abuses. I ask the women at the Rattle Snake about this.

Janet, a Russian woman in a baggy T-shirt and tights, is as sweet as can be—until I tell her I’m a journalist who wants to know about trafficking. She undergoes a drastic mood swing. “Every woman who has slept with more than two men is a prostitute,” she says venomously. “So what do you want?”

When I reply, “Actually, some women are forced into this,” she practically spits.

“That is a fairy tale. It’s not true. No one is that naïve,” she says. Her friend cautions her in Russian and Janet calms down. “Okay, a few years ago, people didn’t understand. Now they do.”

Janet then explains that she works in a travel agency on Sheikh Zayed Road, not far away. She comes to the bar to moonlight for extra cash. No pimp controls her movement or shares her earnings. She pays the same thirteen-dollar cover charge that I did, and she often buys her own beer. If she doesn’t get picked up within an hour or two, she shrugs and goes home. She can’t stay late because she’s got to get up for work.

She waves her hand at the women pouring through the bar’s front door in all manner of outlandish costumes. “None of us would be here if we didn’t want to be,” she says.

I met a pair of trafficked women in Dubai at a private shelter called City of Hope. Both refused to be interviewed, but through volunteers at the shelter and its Emirati-American director, Sharla Musabih, I heard their stories.

The shelter is a hard-luck place, home to broken women doing their best to get over traumatic abuse. At the same time, they struggle to navigate the slow and complex Dubai legal system, seeking permission to leave the country. The two dozen women at the shelter come from Eastern Europe, Iran, India, Britain, and former Soviet Central Asia. Most come from Ethiopia. Few of the Ethiopians speak anything other than Amharic, and, until coming to Dubai, they knew little beyond rural subsistence. People from such uneducated backgrounds are easily manipulated.

One Ethiopian woman at the shelter signed on for a three-year stint as a Dubai housemaid. She wound up enslaved on a farm in the desert. The woman escaped after seven months of brutal work, for which she went unpaid.
¹

A nineteen-year-old Moldovan woman named Ivana came to Dubai in 2004 with a group of young women who signed on for waitressing jobs.
²
On arrival, the women were driven to Sharjah and locked in anapartment,
their passports confiscated. There Ivana reported that a Russian man and a Turkish woman confronted them with slaps on the face and a threatening lecture. The two were pimps. The pimps told the Moldovans they were being dragooned to work as hookers until they’d repaid the debts they’d amassed.

“We’ve just paid for your airline tickets. You’d better pay us back,” the Turkish woman threatened.
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The prostitution ring sent them to three-star hotels in Dubai and Sharjah, where the Moldovans had sex with customers who’d made arrangements. Ivana described a special fear of Arab clients. Many raped her with cruelty that seemed to stem from hatred. It’s a common complaint. After a year, Ivana ran off with one of her customers and escaped the ring. She moved in with the man for a while, but he got deported. She took up with another man, who brutalized her, then disappeared. She gave birth to two children along the way. With nowhere else to turn, Ivana moved into the shelter in 2007.

Musabih has a long list of such cases. There are the two young Uzbeks who dashed out of the brothel where they were held captive, bounding down the street in leopard-print halter tops and gold disco boots. They hailed a cab to the airport, where security bundled them into black
abayas
and called City of Hope. There is the nineteen-year-old from Belarus, enslaved in a Dubai brothel for four years by a Russian man, who forced her to perform sex on hundreds of men—even while pregnant. In 2007, after giving birth to a son, the Belarusian managed to weaken the bars on her window and escape. She spent four months at the shelter before returning home.

The Indian consulate in Dubai also operates a shelter. Its location is secret. It receives as many as forty women a month, many of them trafficked prostitutes. Victims who turn up are sometimes dropped off by a sympathetic John, or they escape by leaping out a window. Women have been known to turn up with sprained ankles and other injuries from their leaps to freedom.

The circumstances described by trafficking victims have a similar ring. Gangs operating in home countries lure women and girls as young as fifteen to Dubai on false pretenses. A pimp or madam meets them at the airport, seizes their passports, locks them away in a brothel, and forces them to recoup a debt, up to $10,000 each. Once they’ve earned enough, the women might win freedom, or they might be sold like slaves to another pimp or two until finally running away.

The State Department report quotes a twenty-three-year-old Kyrgyz woman named Alexia: “I answered a newspaper advertisement for a Russian-speaking waitress in the United Arab Emirates. When my plane landed, a man took me to an apartment where I met a dozen other women. I asked them if they all worked at the restaurant as waitresses. They laughed and one said: ‘Restaurant? You’re not going to work at a restaurant! You’ll find out tonight where you are working!’ I was held in Dubai for six months and prostituted by the traffickers. I met a man from Moscow who helped me to escape to the Kyrgyz Embassy.”

The report says women from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, India, Pakistan, China, the Philippines, Iraq, Iran, and Morocco are trafficked to the UAE on false pretenses and prostituted. The UAE did not demonstrate vigorous law enforcement or victim protection efforts, the State Department says.

Fighting such crimes is tough in the UAE. Diplomats prefer to place escaped victims at shelters rather than involving the police, because the lawmen—most of them imported from conservative Sudan and Yemen—usually jail them as criminals. “The police just don’t get it,” Musabih says. “They take these poor women and stack them in police headquarters.”

Investigators face problems of jurisdiction and a lack of will to prosecute UAE citizens. When a foreign embassy reports the arrival of a trafficked woman to Dubai police, an investigator may find that the Emirati citizen who sponsored her work visa lives in the emirate of Ajman.
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The Dubai authorities tell the diplomat to pursue the case there. But in Ajman, police send the diplomat back to Dubai, saying that’s where the crime took place. The Emirati accomplice, who may be using his sponsorship quota to bring women into the country, evades prosecution by denying knowledge of the crime, usually reporting that the women ran away.

The victims don’t usually speak English or Arabic and rarely care to spend months in the UAE to cooperate with investigators who treat them as criminals. Prosecution is rare.

The trafficking crackdown that Gargash has promised has not dented the number of abused women turning up at shelters, Musabih and others say. There is a clear path to the culprits that is being ignored. The key to unraveling trafficking gangs, observers say, is to arrest the victim’s
sponsor, often an Emirati citizen, who may have sold work visas to a trafficking ring.

Anwar Gargash is one of the busiest men in the country, with two ministerial portfolios. He heads Gargash Enterprises, a family business with an exclusive import license for Mercedes. He also chairs the UAE’s anti-human trafficking committee. It sounds like an incompatible role, but Gargash is a can-do sort, with a Cambridge University PhD that qualifies him to speak with authority and sensitivity on issues of potential embarrassment to the government.

Gargash is shorter than he appears in news photos. He is dressed in a white
kandoura
and toys with his headscarf as he speaks. He’s got a Kenny Rogers beard and smiles broadly at any hint of humor. His mobile phone interrupts, but Gargash never takes his calls, just glances at the screen.
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Gargash agrees that investigators need to target visa sponsors. But, he says, prosecution under the UAE’s tough trafficking law requires strident burdens of proof.

There are other measures the UAE is taking, including training police and prosecutors to take a more inquisitive view of the prostitutes they arrest. Rather than locking up hookers as simple morality criminals, the cops need to probe the gangs behind them. “Is this a simple case of prostitution? Or is this a case where the prostitute is a victim who’s been trafficked? Maybe the person in front of them is a victim, not a culprit,” he says.