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Article Excerpt
Dubai is a remarkable success story. From its origins as a small fishing and pearling community, the emirate has gone from strength to strength, having established itself as the premier trading entrepot of the Arabian Gulf and, in more recent years, having boomed into a massive metropolis of some two or more million, most of whom are expatriates engaged in an increasingly diversified economy. However, in addition to concerns over the sustainability of Dubai's development model, misgivings among the emirate's national population over the enormous social impact of the forces of globalization, and a reliance on the continuing stability of its closest neighbors in the federation of United Arab Emirates, Dubai's future success is now also endangered by a rise in the level of the internal security threat. Although oil-rich Abu Dhabi has been able to build up the UAE's armed forces and other federal security services by procuring some of the finest military hardware available, the UAE has nevertheless had little option but to remain firmly under a Western military umbrella. This not only undermines Dubai's historical preference for neutrality; it also weakens several components of the traditional monarchy's ruling bargain, not least the Al-Maktum family's need to position itself as a public supporter of Arab and Muslim causes.
Moreover, as an unfortunate, but perhaps inescapable, hidden cost of Dubai's emergence as the region's premier free port, for many years the emirate has also attracted the attention of both criminal and terrorist international organizations, many of which have exploited Dubai's geographic location, laissez-faire attitudes, and impressive infrastructure to set up various smuggling, gunrunning, human-trafficking, money-laundering and terror-funding operations.
Certainly, with the exception of delinquent acts performed by thrill-seeking younger members of the national population, most crimes in Dubai are far from petty and are often perpetrated by large cartels. Thus, while it remains relatively safe to walk the city's streets at all times of day and night, massive transit-related crimes are being committed behind the scenes. Most worryingly, despite Dubai's undoubted usefulness to the groups controlling such activities, the emirate has not been able to remain completely in the eye of the storm and has suffered from a number of terrorist attacks on its own soil. Although most of the recent attempts have been foiled, any escalation of such activity will threaten its increasingly foreign-investment dependent economy. The emirate's carefully constructed reputation for stability will decline, and the government will become less able to defend its crucial laissez-faire policies from international criticism.
SMUGGLING AND CONTRABAND
Since the waves of merchant immigration from Iran and other parts of the Gulf that began in the late nineteenth century, (1) Dubai's much described re-exporting merchants were often operating in a grey area between legal trade and smuggling. Certainly, the "informal shipments" of textiles, gold and other goods out of India and the Far East that took place during the 1950s and early 1960s were only lucrative for Dubai-based merchants if they were able to avoid the taxes, tariffs and other restrictions imposed by various governments. By the mid-1960s, with Jawaharlal Nehru's administration still in power, and with regime change having taken place in Pakistan, (2) even tighter trading legislation was coming into effect in South Asia. Dubai's once-profitable grey area had all but disappeared, as it had become well-known that many merchants, both indigenous and expatriate, were openly engaged in contraband operations. So illicit had their activities become that certain companies would often have to wait several weeks before collecting their goods; they could not risk their dhows being intercepted by patrol boats. (3)
Gold re-exporting became particularly problematic following the opening of Dubai's airport and improvements to Sharjah's air-freight facilities at this time. (4) More frequent inspections began to take place in the former, while greater duties on air shipments were imposed by the latter in an effort to recoup some of the construction costs. In order to keep overhead low, many of Dubai's gold merchants were forced to hire pilots to land aircraft on the sabkha, or salt flats, and then to transfer the gold from the aircraft to their safes. (5) Similarly, by the late 1960s, the British-proposed Dangerous Drugs Regulation that was eventually put into effect by the Trucial States Council also made the shipment of hashish and opium illegal. Throughout the previous decade, Dubai and Sharjah had been major centers for the re-export (and local consumption) of such substances. Thus, the trade was forced underground. (6)
Today, Dubai remains synonymous with smuggling. Many shipping companies continue to exploit loopholes in other countries' trading regulations or actively evade foreign customs-enforcement services, and such opportunities have begun to attract mafia groups to the emirate from much further afield, including Russia and China. In some widely reported cases, these operations have generated much negative publicity. Notably, in 2001, British American Tobacco's UAE agent was accused by British broadsheet newspapers of being involved in the illegal re-exporting of cigarettes from Dubai to Somalia, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. Remarkably, it was also claimed that his trading group had smuggled over 70 million cigarettes from Dubai into the UK, which has very high cigarette taxes. Tellingly, when presented with hundreds of pages of signed correspondence with BAT and the minutes of BAT meetings in which he was described as their "transiteer in Dubai," the merchant in question defended his position by stating that he had only been acting in the "time-honoured business tradition of Dubai, ... which is an entrepot centre for goods being imported for re-export."
Nevertheless, later that year an official report from the World Customs Organization confirmed that Dubai was one of the main smuggling routes into Europe. (7) Following an investigation by Paul O'Neil, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, the United States accused Dubai of serving as a conduit for Taliban gold. Indeed, the UAE had been slow to distance itself from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. (8) Even in the days following the Anglo-American invasion, the federal authorities were permitting incoming flights of Ariana, the national airline of Afghanistan, (9) and were allowing small airlines based in Dubai and Sharjah to operate flights into Kabul and Kandahar. Most of these were thought to be laden on their return with gold bound for re-export to Pakistan and Sudan. (10) Moreover, Dubai has also recently received much bad international press on those occasions when its smuggling operations have spilled over into violent gang crime. In particular, in 2004, a human carrier for a Russian mafia group smuggling diamonds into Dubai was assassinated along with his entire family. (11) In a separate incident, members of two rival smuggling outfits were involved in a shootout in broad daylight on the premises of a major tourist hotel. (12)
GUNRUNNING AND THE MERCHANT OF DEATH
Dubai has also had a long history of involvement in the international arms trade. Many of the UAE's contemporary arms exhibitions are completely legal, including the Dubai Air Show, which features not only commercial aircraft but also military aircraft and ordnance, and Abu Dhabi's IDEX, which is thought to be one of the largest weapons bazaars in the developing world. As the research department of a U.S. think tank has described it, purchasing arms at the latter event is "as simple and straightforward as buying groceries from a local supermarket." (13) However, underneath such state-sponsored exhibitions there also exists a large number of gunrunners who use Dubai as a base for massive illegal operations. While this is nothing new, with such activities having been detected and frowned upon in Dubai for over a century, it would seem that the emirate's reputation as an arms-trafficking depot has worsened even further in recent years.
As a result of suspicions that Dubai and Ajman were being used by French and other merchants as hubs to ship over 200 rifles per month into India, (14) as early as 1902, the British had introduced specific legislation to tighten up the arms trade in the lower Gulf. (15) Nevertheless, by 1910, the situation had barely improved, with British patrol boats regularly intercepting dhows laden with arms. Most infamously, having trailed a suspicious dhow to Dubai and then subsequently having received reports of a secret arms cache located in the town, the HMS Hyacinth laid anchor off the coast (16) and dispatched a small force of Royal Marines to conduct a search. Encountering stiff resistance from the gunrunners, several of the soldiers were...
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