Arabian Vice: Sex, Lies and Videotape in Dubai City

The world’s oldest profession has found a ripe new market in the Middle East, reports Sachi Cunningham…

Our last evening in Dubai and we’re walking into ‘Cyclone’, one of the largest night clubs in the city, known for its high quality mix of Eastern European, Asian and African sex workers. The décor is decidedly cheap and neon, pulsing with clusters of coy women who bat their eyes at men circling the room. It’s like any large club really, except the dance floor is eerily empty. I have taped a small video camera to my inner thigh, and have a mini disc recorder in my bag – that to the eye looks like a poor man’s iPod – with stereo mics attached to it disguised as headphones. There is security and a metal detector at the entrance, but I don’t get patted down. In the bathroom I stare at a bloody pad drowning in the toilet as I move the camera to my purse. I join my reporting partner Mimi sitting at a table near the bar, the camera poking out of an open zipper on the side of my bag. Mimi takes a drag of her cigarette and looks around. Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’ pumps through the speakers, as a herd of international businessmen and young women size each other up, bartering fantasies. Unlike regular clubs, where an interested look can start a conversation about your work, your interests or your astrological sign, the exchanges here are short and to the point.

“How much you want?” a man in a pressed blue shirt asks as he stops at our table.

“Too much for you,” Mimi says.

Previously we had played along with these advances, but we are burnt from nearly two weeks in clubs like these, trying to learn more about Dubai’s sex trade for our PBS documentary. Like most boomtowns, Dubai has become a city full of paradoxes: a mixture of glamour, opportunity, desperation and human rights abuses. It’s a city that shapes itself as a modern cosmopolitan paradise, a playground for international visitors, yet when 15 year old French schoolboy Alexandre Robert was raped by three local men in July this year, he was advised to flee Dubai because he could be prosecuted for homosexuality. It’s a city with the tallest building in the world, the Burj Dubai (still under construction), yet that same building was the site of a 2,500 strong riot last year, when labourers on as little as US $4 a day smashed cars and offices in a dispute about pay and poor working conditions. Most of these workers, and nearly 75% of Dubai’s population, is foreign born: the city has become a Mecca for tax-free multinational business, luring a young, hungry, disproportionately male work force from India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Dubai’s utopian cluster of man made islands is literally rising from the sea to house the elite of this work force that totalled nearly 25,000 newcomers per month last year. Everyone from subcontracted kitchen workers to Halliburton’s hired guns stop through for R&R from the war in Iraq. Here the oldest profession in the world has found a ripe and thriving market.

“She ain’t messin’ with no broke…”

I mistakenly make eye contact with one of the guards patrolling the floor. Paranoid, I walk to the bar to see how visible my camera is to the passing eye. The camera can pass, but what sticks out prominently is Mimi and myself. The prostitutes are clearly divided into enclaves based on nationality. Mimi, a Bulgarian American, and myself, a Japanese American, appear to be the only women of different colours that are actually talking with each other. Depending on nationality these women are making anywhere from 200 – 2000 Dirhams for the night [approx. £26 – £260]. The going rate for four hours is based on nationality, with the Arab women demanding the highest price and the Chinese the least.
“There’s just so many of them,” explained an American journalist that we had met at York, another popular club, earlier in our trip. He boasted that he could get several Chinese for the price of one, “and they clean your apartment in the morning too,” he said with a pasty, pock-faced grin as a set of three longhaired beauties swarmed him.

I walk back to the table with two vodka tonics.

“Get down girl, go head get down.”

Sasha, a Siberian prostitute that we interviewed earlier had sent home enough “gold” to buy her family a house. When she first came to Dubai she told us of being locked in a room where she would sleep with dozens of construction workers every night for less than a dollar per John. Now she could be selective. She had regular clients like the American from Texas who texted her a love note during our interview.

“He wants sex for free,” she told us, but she wasn’t interested in love. She was in Dubai for the same reason as every other foreign worker that we met: to get rich quick.

We’d come to Dubai as part of Mimi’s photojournalistic investigation of the sex trade. She had focused on sex trafficking in Eastern Europe for the last three years. In Moldova she met a woman who had been trafficked to Dubai. The woman was supposed to return to Dubai this week to try to find the illegitimate child she had left behind, but in the end her paperwork didn’t go through and the father, a policeman, discouraged her visit. We’d come to Dubai anyway, but it didn’t take long to realise that women with illegal papers doing illegal work aren’t so keen on talking in front of a video camera. So we got creative, combing the clubs and malls for documentary subjects. After one more drink and a little more footage, we decide we’ve had enough and head back to our hotel to pack. I’m booked on a return flight to the US the next morning. The first thing that I notice when we open the door to our room are our beds. The sheets are made despite hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door that morning. A few feet into the room and we see our clothes and belongings strewn all over the floor. My computer and hard drives are gone. Mimi’s reporting notebooks have vanished from the night table. Mimi calls the front desk, but they refuse to contact the police.

“We’ve just been robbed, and you’re telling me to wait until the morning?” Mimi asks with disbelief.

I open the safety deposit box to make sure that my passport, ticket and shot tapes are still safe. They are all accounted for. I walk down to the lobby and demand an explanation. Not wanting to make a scene, the worker finally places the call. Within five minutes a team of police are at the hotel. I take them to our room and explain the scene: that I have told the cleaning crew that morning not to come to our room, but that the beds were made when we returned that evening. We look through the remaining clothes to try and figure out what was stolen. I try to conceal the purses with holes ripped out for the camera on either side. The police assume it is an inside job. They tell us that all of the cleaning help, like most low paid labourers in Dubai, live together; finding the thief and stolen goods should be easy. Another crew of officers take fingerprints while a group of plain clothed officers are dispatched to search the cleaning crew’s housing. Mimi photographs the crime scene. We’re asked to come to the police station to file a report. Problem is, we have to get our passports, tickets and tapes from the safe deposit box. Mimi has already disclosed that we’re reporters.

“We were told that Dubai was one of the safest places in the world,” she says as she takes another shot. Something doesn’t feel right though; I’m nervous about the police seeing the footage we’ve shot. We had recorded a side of Dubai on those tapes that the local authorities would not be happy about. Without any discussion Mimi, a good deal taller than me, grabs my purse and stands in front of door of the box in order to block the view as she fills the bag with tapes. Grabbing five at a time, one batch slips from her nervous clutch and crashes to the floor. My heart surges as I pick them up and Mimi hands me the filled bag.

The police station is empty apart from a drunk guy with a bloody head. We give our fingerprints and they copy our passports. When they see that Mimi is born in Bulgaria, their questions become more suspicious.

“Why are you here again?”

“When did you leave Bulgaria?”

We maintain that we are journalists and file written reports.

“Show me your camera,” the police chief asks Mimi upon hearing that she had photographed the crime scene. A lump grows in my stomach beneath my purse filled with tapes.
“My camera is in the hotel room,” Mimi says in her icy Eastern European accent, without skipping a beat.

I know she has her camera with her, and that the camera also contains photos of prostitutes. An officer takes Mimi back to the room as I wait at the police chief’s desk. A Somalian officer continues to take down my information. I remember a faulty memory card that Mimi had discovered at the start of the trip and wonder how she will ever be able to pull a switch off. The morning call to prayer sounds as the glow of dawn comes through the windows. Mimi returns and hands her camera over to the police chief.

“What’s wrong with it?” he asks, showing her the ‘error’ sign that pops up when he turns the camera on.

“I don’t know,” she says, playing along. I find out later that, escorted by two officers, Mimi went back to the room, and pretended to find her camera in the far corner of the room where her broken memory card sat stashed in a side pocket of her camera bag. She put the card full of images in the tiny pocket of her jeans. In front of the police chief she takes the camera card out and dusts it off. She does the same with the camera batteries. The error message still shows up.

“You can take it if you’d like,” Mimi tells the chief. He hands her the camera back and tells the officers to return us to the hotel. I throw my clothes in a bag while we wait for our fixer to pick us up and take us to the airport. He arrives, and after running over the night’s drama with him as he drives, he tells us that the hotel is owned by the Chief of Police, and that the robbery, conveniently staged on our last night in the hotel, was likely something more akin to a planned raid. We had probably been watched, he says. As he and Mimi try to piece together the evening’s events, I pull all of the labels off of the tapes and disperse them throughout my bag. Mimi is scheduled to leave the next day, so I give her my video camera to take with her so as not to draw any attention when checking in.

At the airport I try to look nonchalant, but immediately after walking through the first security pass I am pulled aside, before even checking in. Behind a curtained room, a veiled woman frisks my clothes and goes through my bags, collecting all of the tapes and putting them in a paper bag.
“Why are you taking those?” I ask, explaining that they contain video of the grand construction and sights of Dubai.

“Let’s watch them now, together,” I say. “There’s nothing on them!”

Waiting on the other side of the security checkpoint, Mimi raises her voice.

“Why are you taking her things?” she asks. People in the airport start to turn their heads our way. I move out of the detention tent and start to call the numbers stored in our cell phone of the police officers that we met earlier that night. The man who took my deposition tells me that airport security is a separate department and that he can’t help us, but that he will send someone to see what the problem is. Almost immediately a plainclothes officer sitting against the airport wall stands up and walks towards the scene.

“Our hotel is broken into, and now I’m being detained?” I ask loud enough for onlookers to hear.

I continue making calls to everyone and anyone as Mimi does the same. The human rights worker we had interviewed earlier that week doesn’t answer, but I carry out a pretend conversation anyway, and then continue calling in for help and with complaints to other locals. With 10 minutes to go before my plane is scheduled to take off, my young UAE escort, outfitted in a traditional white cloak and headscarf, receives an order in his earpiece. He hands the bag of tapes to me.

“I’m sorry, but we made a mistake,” he says without explanation. “We thought you were someone else.” He walks with me to check in my bags and escorts me to the plane. Still in a state of shock, I unload the tapes into my purse as the plane takes off. Why did they let me go and how could we have been so naïve as to think that we could have filmed all that time without anyone noticing? But then, surely prostitution is so widely practiced here, and so visible, that the authorities wouldn’t really care if someone shot footage of it? Someone clearly did. Confused, but thankful that I’m flying home with taped evidence of the sex trade rather than a bunch of tall tales, I collapse into a deep sleep, clutching the purse strapped over my body.

Thumbnail picture by Mimi Chakarova

Posted by Sachi Cunningham in Other | May 29, 2008 8:42AM |