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NY Times Op-Ed, May 29 2015
Art and Hypocrisy in the Gulf
By NICHOLAS MCGEEHAN
LONDON — On May 11, the Lebanese artist Walid Raad was turned away at
the airport when he tried to enter the United Arab Emirates, where the
government is making a big investment in art with the Saadiyat Island
project. The project, in the capital, Abu Dhabi, will include branches
of the Louvre and the Guggenheim as well as a campus of New York University.
Mr. Raad, who teaches at Cooper Union in New York, says he heard an
Emirates immigration officer say that he was being turned away for
security reasons.
The previous week, the Mumbai-based artist Ashok Sukumaran was denied a
visa to enter the United Arab Emirates for undefined “security reasons.”
Others recently denied entry to the country on the vague pretext of
security reasons include Andrew Ross, a New York University professor
who has been fiercely critical of labor abuses on Saadiyat Island, and
the journalist Sean O’Driscoll, who last year co-wrote a New York Times
article on harsh labor conditions at the Abu Dhabi campus.
The exploitative labor system in the United Arab Emirates binds migrant
workers to employers, who confiscate their passports as a matter of
course, which makes it nearly impossible for the workers to escape
abuse. Exorbitant recruitment fees and the prohibition of trade unions
add to the toxic mix.
In 2010, the developers of Saadiyat Island promised special labor
protections for the workers, but that has failed to stop all the abuses.
The Times article last year found that workers had been beaten by police
officers and arbitrarily deported when they went on strike to protest
low pay. In February, Human Rights Watch documented serious shortcomings
in the enforcement of the labor codes.
Mr. Raad and Mr. Sukumaran are both members of the Gulf Labor Coalition,
which has been calling for a boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. The
refusal to admit these artists, along with others pursuing creative and
intellectual work, suggests that the United Arab Emirates and its
development partners are unwilling to tolerate criticism and open debate.
In January 2014, as I left the country after doing research for our
latest report on the treatment of the workers, the immigration
authorities told me I was permanently blacklisted and could never
return. They refused to give a reason.
On May 1, the Guggenheim described its Abu Dhabi project as “an
opportunity for a dynamic cultural exchange and to chart a more
inclusive and expansive view of art history.” John Sexton, who plans to
retire as president of N.Y.U. next year, said something similar in 2007,
when he described N.Y.U. and Abu Dhabi as “a good fit” and said that
they shared “a belief that the evolving global dynamic will bring about
the emergence of a set of world centers of intellectual, cultural and
educational strength.” The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s website says it will be a
place of “discovery, exchange and education” and describes it as “a
product of the 18th century Enlightenment in Europe.”
These are laudable sentiments, but in practice they amount to empty words.
Banning artists and writers is nowhere close to the most repressive
actions of the government.
Domestic critics have been at risk of disappearance, torture and
imprisonment. The human rights lawyer Mohamed al-Roken is just one of
scores of Emiratis serving long-term prison sentences after unfair
trials. Last November, Osama al-Najer was sentenced to three years in
prison on charges that included “communicating with external
organizations to provide misleading information.” Mr. Najer had been
quoted in a Human Rights Watch news release on the alleged torture of
political detainees.
The government has continued to use a repressive 2012 cybercrime law to
prosecute critics. In 2013, it even sentenced an American to 12 months
in prison under the law, for his participation in a video parodying
Dubai youth culture.
In 2014, a court convicted two Emiratis, Khalifa Rabia and Othman
al-Shehhi, of criticizing state security on Twitter, sentenced them to
five years in prison and fined them over $98,000. The television channel
24.ae subsequently referred to Mr. Rabia’s use of hashtags like
#UAE_freemen as evidence of his subversion.
A 2014 counterterrorism law allows the courts to convict peaceful
government critics as terrorists and sentence them to death. The
crackdown has been so far-reaching that there are no longer any lawyers
in the country actively defending dissidents.
In this context of repression, it’s clear that whatever the Louvre, the
Guggenheim and New
