A few days ago I read a widely-blogged article by Johann Hari about the dark side of Dubai: the glittering towers have been built by effectively slave labour, financed by a non-renewable source of debt, run by an archaic government that tolerates no opposition, in a desert environment polluted by sewage that is fast running out of water. The most striking theme of the (long, but worthwhile) article is the sheer number of people that he talks to who either don’t see, or don’t care about, the monstrous level of exploitation and racism this society is built upon.
Today I read that the pirate problem in Somalia is also not what it seems (via jwz. Amongst other things, in the absence of a proper government, Europeans are dumping nuclear and chemical waste off the shores of Somalia (this much is backed up by an official UN report (PDF) someone posted in the Independent comments, and reposted in jwz’s comments - page 10 in the PDF, labelled page 135), and looting their fishing resources at an unsustainable level (not documented as yet, but given the EU’s past history in e.g. Mauritania, that doesn’t sound at all surprising).
And it turns out this is the same guy that interviewed Tony Blair for Attitude magazine (they’ve put it behind a subscription paywall, so here’s Hari’s take on it).
All in all, I think this is someone worth reading. Bookmark the Independent’s link to his columns, or put the related RSS feed into your feed reader.
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