I recently stepped out of my apartment in Sharjah and absentmindedly forgot to lock the door behind me. I have always lived in places where doors lock automatically. I wasn’t gone for very long, but long enough for someone to enter and rifle through all the drawers and take any money that was lying loose. Fortunately, the burglar only got away a bunch of spare change left on a table and both my children’s wallets
We live in a big complex—33 floors with over 100apartments—lived in by relatively well-to-do, conservative expatriate families from the Arab world and Indian sub-continent. I thought the building was secure, but what surprised me the most was that someone would risk being caught in a country that comes down hard on crime. I’m sure that after serving the sentence, the perpetrator (if he were a foreigner) would never be let back into the country again—a serious consideration when so many guest workers are dependent on the Emirates for their livelihood.
Twenty years ago, when I lived here before, there was virtually no crime. There were times where I would be in a rush to get to the bank before it closed and I would unconsciously leave the car doors unlocked with thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment lying on the back seat.Back then, the cops were everywhere. They were bored—it was a time when a small dent on the side of your car would warrant a fine—and we had to be on the lookout. Now, with so many cars on the roads, police have their hands full with real traffic problems. Gone are the days of cruising for dents, or burglars for that matter.
Part of the problem is that the UAE, and in particularDubai, is growing at such an alarming rate that the locals represent less than 20% of the population. Background checks on cheap immigrant workers—from Pakistan, India, andBangladesh—are not as thorough as before. Once inside, if a person then wants to quit his job, it’s harder to keep track of them. They can just disappear, blending into the migrant population. Then there is the criminal element—the pimps, the drug dealers and the human traffickers. Crime breeds crime.
Near my home, they recently opened a Carrefour mega-market. To get there, I need to cross a few streets, one of which is a busy highway. In order to make it safe for pedestrians, an underpass was built; a very good idea in a country where so many pedestrians are lost to traffic accidents each year. However, I was shocked to see women with babies at either end of the pedestrian underpass—In the years before, I had never seen a single beggar. Begging is against the law and punishable by prison and deportation.And then if you think about it, why would anyone have a need to beg in a country that is so prosperous with a foolproof system? Emiratis are looked after, while foreigners are hereto work and therefore have a sponsor that looks after them.
Like Beirut and Cairo, the beggars are not begging for their own well-being; rather they are taken advantage of to make money for small time gangs that protect them in return for a cut of the proceeds. It appears the underworld is moving in.
The bottom line is that as Dubai and all the otherEmirates grow, the small-town feel that once made living here so attractive is all but disappearing; now suddenly, the Emirates are beginning to suffer from the big time problems that plague large cities around the world. Now the talk at dinner parties never drifts too far from the subject of crime—not the lack of it, as was the case in the ’80s.And even though the authorities do not publish figures, it is obvious that crime is on the rise. Everyone seems to have a horror story to tell, from gang rape to petty theft. Even the locals have been arrested and convicted of crimes, ranging from theft to murder. Dubai, it seems, offers more than just tourism and duty free shopping.
Maybe I protest too much. Maybe I’m just getting old. Yes, the UAE is still one of the safest places on earth to live.But my question is—for how much longer?
NORBERT SCHILLER is a photo editor and photographer at large with United Press International (UPI)
