Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 11:07 pm Post subject: Dubai - Slavery's new Mecca
Maybe the new shiny building Brad will endorse will house sex slaves. Is Jolie the humanitarian aware of this? I mean she claims to be so aware of the evils in the world.....or is it just that 13 -15 year old girls aren't cute enough to adopt and be seen at her side so she could care less what happens to them.
To enter Dubai’s most notorious brothel, the Cyclone, I paid $16 for a ticket that the bursar stamped with the official seal of the Department of Tourism & Commerce Marketing. Prostitution is illegal in Dubai, whose laws are rooted in Islam, with penalties ranging up to death. But the stamp was only the first of several contradictions in a place of slavery for women that one well-travelled British monger referred to as “Disneyland for men.”
One sign read No Soliciting; another read No Camouflage in the Disco Area. In the club, no less than 500 prostitutes solicited a couple dozen prospective clients, some Western servicemen among them.
An Indian living in London owned the place, and had not updated the decor in a decade, as if taste would reduce the charm and thus deter tourists. I walked over to the bar, and two Korean girls, who looked no older than 15 and claimed to be sisters, approached me.
“Do you want massage?” one asked.
While the strobe lights, the loud music and the general whirlpool of anxious femininity lent an air of abject chaos, the place was carefully ordered by race. Stage left was a crush of Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean women; centre stage were sub-Saharan Africans; stage right were Eastern European and Central Asian women, who initially identified themselves as Russians, but later revealed specifically that they were Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Uzbek and Moldovan.
A young Chinese woman wore a childlike perfume. The club bathed her in black light, so that she appeared like a radioactive negative of herself. In broken English, she explained that she had arrived in Dubai 28 days earlier, having been promised a job as a maid. Instead, human smugglers known as snakeheads sold her to a madam who forced her to pay off a debt by selling sex here. She trembled as she said that she just wanted to go home.
Her story was not unusual. A night earlier in another mega-bordello located in the three-star York International Hotel in the tony Bur Dubai neighbourhood, a 30-year-old Uzbek told me she had to pay off a $10,000 debt or "the mafia will kill my children."
In the Cyclone, every woman who spoke with me in depth explained that traffickers had taken their passports away as collateral until they paid off a debt. Alina, a bleach-blonde from northern Romania, sat forlornly smoking and playing electronic solitaire along the back wall. She had a raspy voice, and a sallow complexion that made her appear much older than her 23 years. She came here in 2004, after divorcing the alcoholic father of her three-year-old son. A Romanian woman in Dubai had promised her work as a waitress in a local restaurant.
When the woman met Alina at the airport, she told her what her real work would be. Without her passport, without any money, without any local contacts, she had no choice but to go with the woman to the Cyclone. From then on, her life was a blur
of clients -- American, European, Indian, and mostly Arab. Some men purchased oral sex in the "VIP Room" above the bar, but they normally took Alina to a hotel or apartment. They were often violent.
"Many problem customers," she said, particularly among the Arabs.
Every morning at six she would return to the apartment of the madam, an abusive woman who took all the money. For Alina's efforts she was given one meal a day, coffee and cigarettes.
Alina contemplated escape, but running to the desert would be a death sentence for her, and running to the police would be a death sentence for her son. Her health faded, her skin fell apart and in the supply-saturated market of the Cyclone, she ceased getting customers, a fact that triggered the furor of her madam.
One night, the woman forced Alina to go with a Syrian man to the neighbouring city of Al Ain. As soon as he picked her up, he started yelling at her in Arabic. She was terrified, and cried all the way to his apartment. There he tortured and raped her for two days. Shortly after the man released her, the madam announced that she was going back to Romania, and that she would manumit Alina.
For the first time in a year, Alina had a choice. Despite the horrendous abuse she had survived, and despite her illegal alien status, she went back to prostitution. She knew her reputation was shattered back home, and that she would never find legitimate work or a husband to provide for her son. So she stayed. But she insisted that "I am for myself."
In the Cyclone I found a range of nationalities, a wealth of sad stories; though most had been enslaved, some were now free. But for Alina, as for many others, there was no joy in freedom.
Before I left, I noted one sign that, unlike the rest, did not contradict the surroundings. On a coaster, embedded underneath the polyurethane finish of the bar top, was a quote by Martin Luther King Jr.: "We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."
Dubai grew at breakneck speed during the 1990s, developing faster than any country on Earth. In 1991, a handful of multistory buildings sat alongside a dusty, two-lane highway, with the occasional oasis, camel tracks and plenty of sand.
Fifteen years later, Dubai was a sparkling metropolis of 1.5 million people. Mirrored glass was everywhere, and while the streets were well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the skyscrapers were chilled to meat locker temperatures by massive air conditioners. Grandiose mosques and palaces gave variation to the skyline, and even the adhan was a sound effect-aided performance.
But with breakneck growth came whiplash. As the U. A. E. steadily loosened barriers to investment and immigration, unscrupulous operators moved in. Drugsmuggling arrests increased 300% in the two years preceding my visit. And Dubai also became the Mecca of the new slave trade. Although slavery was abolished here in 1963, many still worked under threat of violence for no pay. On occasion, unpaid or underpaid laborers resisted. In March, 2006, a small group of South Asian construction workers building the Burj Dubai tower -- set to be the world's tallest building -- rampaged through the emirate for several days to protest poor working conditions and low pay. Rami G. Khouri, the editor of Beirut's Daily Star, called it "our first modern slave revolt in the Arab region."
While the rioters were exploited, they were not enslaved. Tens of thousands of others were, but their plight was hidden. In addition to bonded construction workers, Filipino housemaids were regularly beaten, raped and denied pay by their Arab masters. As many as 6,000 child camel jockeys -- mainly from South Asia -- languished in hidden slavery on farms, where their masters beat them and starved them to keep their weight down.
Yeah I think it's a sad commentary on women, that they get all steamed up about the faggots and the fact that I might be hurting their faggy little feelings, while out OWN GENDER is STILL being paid 70 cents to every dollar that a man makes, that our femininity is being exploited and degraded to push products that have NOTHING to do with women whatever, that our daughters are being 'programmed for prostitution on every hand (it is now being PUSHED as a "career choice" in high schools) and THIS: sexual slavery; the fasted growing sector of organized crime. Oh, and don't forget KIDDY PORN; the kids that are the "cannon fodder" for this industry weren't found under cabbage leaves, you know! But NOOOObody has a problem with THAT, you know! It's only the faggy-waggys' little feelings we are REALLY concerned about; our OWN gender can GO HANG.
Funny, i believe the majority of my comment WAS about sexual slavery. You think it only happens in DUBAI? The problem is INTERNATIONAL in scope; Dubai is only ONE place it happens! Didja know that in Thailand they have actual charter vacations that will take pervs on tours through the CHILD BROTHELS? That's how widespread and endemic this sort of thing has become. And how cold and callous humanity has become to its own offspring!
Well hey, Jolie bought Maddox from a black-market baby trafficker, who, no doubt, bought and sold children for 'the trade". What, you think children who are bought and sold all go to happy loving homes? Phhhht!And MicKKKey is a drug cartel HIT MAN; the DRUG TRADE is CLOSELY allied to the sex slave trade; how do you think they keep the slaves under control? i guess Pax was "lucky", sort of; HE didn't wind up as a boy prostitute, but his ass is STILL being pimped out for publicity!
They are both such hypocrites. I couldn't believe when I first heard Brad was going to be associated with anything in Dubai. It's probably the most over indulgent, decadent, over consuming place on the earth. How can he support these super rich people who throw enough money away in one week that could have fed a poor village for a year? And Jolie the humanitarian (puke) right behind him. I'm sure she knows about the child and sex slavery that goes on there, but it doesn't matter as long as they are getting a big paycheck.
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aware of this? I mean she claims to be so aware of the evils in the world.....or is it just that 13 -15 year old girls aren't cute enough to adopt and be seen at her side so she could care less what happens to them.
