City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (15 page)
Read City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism Online
Authors: Jim Krane
The gloomy outlook did not infect the new country’s few hundred thousand citizens. Everyone but the rulers, it seemed, was happy to be rid of the British.
Iran’s takeover of Abu Musa and the Tunbs put a charge into people. The land grab spoiled independence celebrations but gave citizens, now known as Emiratis, a chance to show national unity. Across the emirates, anger at Iran turned into nationalist fervor, a new phenomenon for a new state.
Dubaians took to the streets to protest the Iranian takeover. Students marched across Deira, shouting, waving, and blocking traffic. When they reached their rally point, speeches were cut short by the arrival of twenty-two-year-old Sheikh Mohammed. The young graduate of Britain’s Sandhurst military academy had just trained as a fighter pilot. He returned home to take the post of UAE defense minister, the world’s youngest ever. The sheikh wore a full beard and carried himself with charisma and authority well beyond his years.
The marchers gathered around Sheikh Mohammed and grew quiet. They hoped that he would say something sympathetic. He thanked the students for their nationalist pride. And that was it. Street demonstrations would be as unwelcome in the UAE as they were before independence. “Everything is being taken care of,” Sheikh Mohammed assured the students. “Thank you very much. Now it’s about time for you
guys to go home.”
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So the students thanked the young sheikh and went home.
Qualms about the UAE’s viability didn’t last long. As the oil discoveries mounted, the country’s wealth—and its strategic value—was increasingly hard to deny. The economy was sizzling, and the world soon discovered that Sheikhs Zayed and Rashid were impressive leaders.
Much of the credit for the country’s postindependence stability is due the British. Whatever the faults of their enforced isolation, their buttressing of the same ruling families for 152 years wound up creating strong leadership institutions, however archaic and undemocratic. Tribal-based family rule survived the British departure without serious challenge.
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The same can be said for the other Gulf Arab sheikhdoms, where British policy cultivated strong monarchies that have gone on to govern stable independent countries. Elsewhere in the Middle East, colonial powers left behind shaky ruling institutions that disintegrated in strife after independence.
In this world, a man with unlimited charisma and unlimited cash can go a long way. That’s essentially how the UAE became a nation, cobbled together by an uneducated guy who had both.
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan was a rare human specimen. He was a true Bedouin chief, riding out of the Abu Dhabi desert on a white stallion. Zayed wore bandoliers of rifle cartridges across his broad chest and gripped his rifle in his fist. The sheikh spent his early decades in a mud fort in the inland oasis of Al Ain, his seat as governor. He spent his days meeting with tribal allies and hunting with falcons. He and his men ate while sitting on the ground around a crude platter of meat and rice, everyone tearing at the carcass with his right hand.
In the early 1950s, Zayed’s reputation as a wise frontiersman reached British explorer Wilfred Thesiger and the Bedouin guides leading him across the Empty Quarter. When Thesiger reached Al Ain, he was keen to meet the governor. He describes the encounter in his brilliant book
Arabian Sands
. Thesiger asked a bystander to take him to Zayed. The man pointed to a throng seated under a thorn tree and said the man at the center was Zayed.
He was a powerfully built man of about thirty with a brown beard. He had a strong, intelligent face, with steady, observant eyes, and his manner was quiet but masterful. He was dressed very simply in a beige-colored shirt of Omani cloth and a waistcoat which he wore unbuttoned. He was distinguished from his companions by his black head-rope, and the way in which he wore his head cloth, falling about his shoulders instead of twisted round his head in the local manner. He wore a dagger and a cartridge belt; his rifle lay on the sand beside him.
I had been looking forward to meeting him, for he had a great reputation among the Bedu. They liked him for his easy informal ways and his friendliness, and they respected his force of character, his shrewdness, and his physical strength. They said admiringly: “Zayed is Bedu. He knows about camels, can ride like one of us, can shoot, and knows how to fight.”
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In those days, Zayed roved the Abu Dhabi outback, rallying the tribes to stay allied with al-Nahyan rule. It was a challenging task. The Saudis offered buyouts to tribes who changed allegiance, thereby bringing their territory—and any oil underneath—under Saudi control. Zayed had little means to counter the Saudis in those days but appealed to tribesmen through their sense of history and honor. In 1952, the Saudis set to work on Zayed himself, offering him a staggering bribe of $42 million to back their claim to Al Ain and the rest of the Buraimi Oasis, which Zayed governed on behalf of his family. Zayed, with an income of just a few thousand dollars a year, spurned the bribe and redoubled his efforts to keep the oasis inside the al-Nahyan family’s lands.
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“Zayed was very proud he’d rejected it,” says Peter Hellyer, the Abu Dhabi leader’s onetime press handler. “He didn’t want much publicity of it—there were enough problems with the Saudis already—but he was very proud that when he had nothing, he told them to get stuffed.”
The bribe was chump change compared to the fortune Zayed would compile after Abu Dhabi struck oil in 1958. When he died in 2004, Sheikh Zayed was one of the world’s richest men, leaving behind a fortune that
Forbes
magazine estimated at $24 billion. And this was despite his best efforts to give money to anyone who would ask.
Zayed wasn’t a tall man, but he was calm and decisive, with a dominant personality. He could read and write, unusual for a chief of his
generation. But he didn’t enjoy writing and ordered an attendant to jot notes on his behalf. He loved to hunt, but gave up shooting game as the antelope began disappearing.
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He was a curious man, fascinated by the work of European archaeologists and naturalists who began arriving during the 1950s. One of these scientists wound up naming a subspecies of bat after him.
British naturalist David Harrison was chatting with the Al Ain governor one evening in 1954. When dusk fell, tiny bats with gossamer wings began to flit above the men. Harrison told Zayed he’d like to examine one of the bats, since little was known about Arabian species. Zayed called for a rifle. He aimed at the sky and blasted away until he’d downed one of the zipping creatures. Harrison declared it a new subspecies and named it
Taphozous nudiventris zayidi
, or Zayed’s sheath-tailed bat.
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In the mid-1960s, after Zayed had traded his camel for a Land Rover, he’d make the six-hour dune drive from Al Ain to Abu Dhabi. On arrival, he liked to look over the exotic goods at a new department store. The store was opened in 1964 by an Indian merchant named Mohan Jashanmal.
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“Jashanmal,” Zayed would say. “Show me the films.”
“Which ones?” Jashanmal would ask, adding in jest, “Films of girls?”
“Show me the films with the tall buildings!” Zayed would thunder, and Jashanmal would hand over the red plastic View-Master, a child’s 3-D viewer with binocular eyepieces and a lever that turned a slide wheel. Sheikh Zayed, sitting in a sandy town with its camels and mud fort, would hold the View-Master up to the light, thumbing his way through slides of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the UN Headquarters. On other occasions Zayed wanted to see English gardens or the California redwoods, and Jashanmal would oblige.
“Jashanmal! One day, you will see. The gardens will be here. The tall buildings will be here,” Zayed would say.
“If you are saying so, okay,” Jashanmal would reply. “But it’s very difficult to believe.”
Zayed deeply wanted for Abu Dhabi to develop, but with his grouchy brother Shakhbut in charge, that wasn’t going to happen. He grew frustrated watching Dubai build itself up while the oil capital of southeastern Arabia remained a village of thatched huts. Finally, in 1966, Zayed gave his big brother the hook. The unseated sheikh fled to Bahrain and
wandered rootlessly around the Middle East, moving to Iran and Lebanon before resettling into anonymous retirement in Al Ain.
Once in power, Zayed was an energized man. One of his first acts in office was to throw open the palace strongbox, giving away all the money that his brother had stockpiled. Zayed made an incredible announcement: Anyone in the seven Trucial States who needed cash for any reason should come see him. People streamed in from every corner of every sheikhdom, traveling to Abu Dhabi by camel, by car, by dhow, and on foot. They lined up outside the leader’s palace, waiting for their turn to ask, and receive. Zayed kept up the handouts until he emptied the coffers.
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The big giveaway sounds like a crazy idea, especially coming as it did before the UAE emerged as an independent nation, so that most of the recipients were, essentially, foreigners. But Zayed’s gifts weren’t mislaid. Local Arabs considered such over-the-top generosity as the behavior of their kind of leader. The upstarts in Dubai couldn’t match the gesture, nor could the has-beens in Sharjah. Zayed’s giveaway went a long way toward welding disparate sheikhdoms into a nation—and toward positioning Zayed as the paternal über-sheikh who should rule.
Sheikh Zayed didn’t disappoint. Each year for the rest of his reign, he made a splashy tour around the emirates, visiting even the dust bowl towns of Ajman and Umm Al-Quwain. People yelled, “The president is coming! The president is coming!” and lined up to greet the great sheikh. He would ask what they needed. “Anything you want, tell me,” Zayed would say. His subjects asked for houses, overseas medical treatment, or the release of a jailed brother. Some handed requests scribbled onto sheets of paper, lest the great sheikh forget.
Zayed’s handlers from the
diwan
, his royal court, compiled names, phone numbers, and requests. Over the next few weeks, the
diwan
would send officials knocking at each door with cash, whether 10,000 dirhams or 100,000 dirhams.
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It was a fantastic nation-building tool. Not just the handouts of cash, but the in-person availability of the national ruler, who would respond like a kind father to personal needs. How could anyone speak against the union if it put cash in your hand?
“We used to think he was too generous, that he was wasting money. But he knew the money wasn’t lost because it bought loyalty for the union,” says Emirati historian Fatima al-Sayegh. “In the West, people
couldn’t reach the government. Here you could. Today, loyalty is stronger in the small emirates because of Sheikh Zayed.”
In 1966, it fell to Zayed to bring Abu Dhabi and then the UAE out of the dark ages. He built the underpinnings of a modern state from scratch. He pieced together a government by drawing up a list of departments and staffing them, one after another, and ordering offices to be built to house them. He hired planners who laid out Abu Dhabi’s avenues on a sensible grid, running sewer and water lines, power and phone wires beneath them. Zayed directed a British firm to erect a pair of diesel generators to bring power, and ordered construction of a desalination plant to distill drinking water from the sea.
Abu Dhabi looked like a film set under construction. Development milestones came even later than Dubai’s. Electricity arrived in 1967; so did telephones—just three hundred lines for a town of fifteen thousand. The phones connected directly to the international network, putting London and New York in reach, but it took two more years before anyone in Abu Dhabi could dial the emirate’s second city, Al Ain. All the concrete, steel, pipe, and everything else imported into Abu Dhabi had to be landed on the beach. Shakhbut’s intransigence left the town without a port or an airport until Zayed had them completed in 1969. Until then, barges and dhows ground their hulls into the beach and laborers carried everything ashore by hand.
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Sheikh Zayed didn’t just hand out cash, he institutionalized it. His government subsidized almost every aspect of life. He gave every Abu Dhabian three or four pieces of land. One was for a home, one for a commercial building, one for a workshop or industrial project, and the fourth was for a farm. To the would-be farmers, Zayed gave tractors and irrigation gear. He sent engineers to design productive farms, and laborers to work them. He gave homes to those who needed them.
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He built schools and a university and set aside overseas scholarships for the smartest.
“There was a feeling that after a long period of deprivation and poverty it was about time that we enjoyed ourselves,” says Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, the Emirati political scientist. “The government’s duty was to establish the best subsidized welfare system on earth.”
As UAE president in 1971, Zayed cleaned up his frontier image, losing the cartridge belts and rifle. He trimmed his full beard to a point on his chin, giving him a slightly villainous look. Any hint of a sinister nature
was offset by his crooked million-dollar grin of white teeth. The sheikh of Abu Dhabi also favored mirrored aviator sunglasses that reflected bursts of blinding sunlight. Together with his beard and flowing robes, the shades and grin made him look like a rock star. Sheikh Zayed not only exuded charisma, he was cool—Mick Jagger take note—right into his seventies. He never got fat, preserving his broad wrestler’s chest and washboard waist. Five years after his death in 2004, Sheikh Zayed’s grinning face is a Warhol-style pop icon; plastered on key fobs, coffee mugs, and sunshades that cover the rear windows of 4x4s.