How Dubai, the playground of businessmen and warlords, is built by Asian w

[emad]

Independent
Dubai's aim of becoming Middle East's commercial capital comes with hidden costs. Nick Meo reports
01 March 2005


Twenty storeys above the streets of Dubai tiny figures of workmen hammer steel into place day and night in the Middle East's biggest construction boom.

Labourers from south Asia man the forest of cranes along the half-built tower blocks south and west of Jumeira Beach, the world's second-biggest building site after Shanghai and a magnet for those hoping to make money by buying property here, ranging from Afghan warlords to the England football team.

The sheikhs who run Dubai plan to make it the commercial capital of the Middle East, so dozens of skyscrapers and thousands of apartment blocks are shooting up. The boom has sucked in an army of workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, unskilled men who toil for years away from families to save £30 a month.

Unlike Dubai's 100,000 pampered British expatriates in air-conditioned luxury, the Asian labourers are banned from the glitzy shopping malls, new golf courses, and smart restaurants.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=615704

DUBAI: world's no 1 money laundering/organised crime/drug cartels paradise...

[Charon]

1. How Dubai is built

I do not think this can be view as earth shattering. When I was in Bahrain about 10 years ago, virtually all of the manual labor, construction and repair was done by Indians, Pakastanis or Asian.
When I was in Saudi Arabia, I never saw a Saudi in construction or road work, only Indians and and Pakastanis. Ports like Yanbu and Al Jubial were built entirly by foreign contractors and labor.