The Gulf states market themselves as glitzy tourist places filled with luxury high rise hotels and shopping malls and recreational areas. But they are also some of the most oppressive places for workers, where migrant workers are brought in and treated almost like slaves, working under extremely harsh conditions and poorly paid, thus resulting in some of the world’s greatest income inequality between the small number of people who are citizens and the huge number of desperately poor imported workers who cannot become citizens nor permanent residents and can be harshly punished if they make the slightest protest.
Bernard Freamon describes the incredibly oppressive conditions of the migrant workers in those countries.
The six city-states on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf, each formerly a sleepy, pristine fishing village, are now all glitzy and futuristic wonderlands. In each of these city-states one finds large tracts of ultramodern architecture, gleaming skyscrapers, world-class air-conditioned retail markets and malls, buzzing highways, giant, busy and efficient airports and seaports, luxury tourist attractions, game parks, children’s playgrounds, museums, gorgeous beachfront hotels and vast, opulent villas housing fabulously affluent denizens. The six city-states – Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Manama in Bahrain, Dammam in Saudi Arabia, Doha in Qatar, and Kuwait City in Kuwait – grew into these luminous metropolises beginning in the 1970s, fuelled by the discovery of oil and gas, an oligarchic accumulation of wealth, and unconditional grants of political independence from the United Kingdom, the former colonial master of the region.
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