"Robert Fisk in Abu Dhabi: The Emirates' out-of-sight migrant workers helping to build the dream projects of its rulers", 29 April 2015

It’s not a labour camp. No such words would soil the lips of the men from the Abu Dhabi Tourism Development and Investment Company. No, it’s the “Saadiyat Accommodation Village”. For here, 7,500 men from the poorest countries of southern Asia – from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Philippines – live and sleep in apparently Utopian comfort when they are not labouring under the Gulf sun on the cultural dream projects of Abu Dhabi’s rulers: the Louvre Museum and the Guggenheim, and the vast emporium built to hold the art treasures of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan at the Zayed National Museum... I contacted a Pakistani driver who knew his way around the three massive labour camps in Dubai, at Senaful, al-Quoz and Jebel Ali. Along the highways out of the city, there are miles of freshly planted trees – it must cost tens of thousands of dollars to water them in the sand – and they are a screen, to prevent visitors or Emirati citizens themselves from having to cast their eyes on the builders of this empire. We stopped the car in a bus park and walked through the trees, and there before us lay concrete camps that stretched into the white hazed horizon. These are no Saadiyat islands. They are three or four-storey concrete blocks that look more like penitentiaries than villages, a bleak and grassless wasteland in which tens of thousands of workers sleep together, sometimes 14 to a room...