How Would Indians Feel if I Say Hindus Should Not be Allowed in UAE, Asks Princess Hend Al Qassimi

Over the last few weeks Princess Hend Al Qassimi, who belongs to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has been flagging hateful and Islamophobic comments on her social media timeline. Many of these were by Indian citizens working in the UAE.

Responding to the worrisome trend, Ambassador Pavan Kapoor told Indian citizens that “discrimination is against our moral fabric and rule of law” and Indians in the Emirates must remember this.

News 18 spoke exclusively to Princess Hend (which means India) and she sounded both anguished and angry over the remarks she has been reading from some individuals. She said Emirati-India relationship is over centuries-old “but this is new, we have never experienced hatred from the Indians."

"I have never heard an Indian attack an Arab or a Muslim before but now I have reported just one person but you can see my timeline is full of people insulting the Arabs, Muslims. This is so un-Indian.”

Princess Hend though realizes that the comments of a few individuals were not representative of the vast majority of Indians working and residing in the UAE but she did subtly put a message across when she said, “Is India trying to force us to pick and choose, who to allow in the Emirates – only the Muslim and the Christian? This isn’t how we were raised. To us, they are all Indians we don’t put them in any category - like we will work with them only because they are Indian Muslim.”

There are around three and a half million Indians in the UAE which is approximately 30 per cent of the population according to the embassy website. This makes Indians the largest ethnic community there.

“How would the Indians feel if I say publicly that that Indian Hindus should not be allowed in Emirates? Close to 14 billion dollars are being remitted back from the Emirates to India every year – in the past year. Imagine if that were to be cut off? The Indians work very hard in this country and I don’t think they deserve people who misrepresent them like that,” Princess Hend added.

She said she is not a political person and hence has not contacted the Indian government over her concerns. But she revealed that she has been in touch with the former Indian ambassador to UAE Navdeep Suri who expressed concern and told her that her message has gone out “loud and clear”. She said hate speech is illegal in her country and she will continue to raise her voice to put a stop to hate, because “she is just a friend of India.”

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Sailing in Dubai

How the UAE condones sexual violence

In the United Arab Emirates, a country that prides itself on modernity and its willingness to advance women's rights, the criminal court in Abu Dhabi has sentenced an 18-year-old Emirati woman to a year in prison for illicit sex after she reported that six men had gang-raped her.

Sadly, her treatment, though outrageous, is not unusual in the UAE. It comes as no surprise that more than half of Emirati women questioned in a survey in January by the YouGov Siraj consulting organisation said they would not report sexual assault or rape to police.

The woman, whose name authorities have not made public, said in court that she had agreed to go for a drive with a 19-year-old male friend. News media reported that she said the friend called five other men to meet them, and when they arrived, they raped her.

During the first hearing on 17 May in Abu Dhabi's criminal court, the six men were charged with rape, four in absentia as the authorities had not found them. The forensics unit at the Abu Dhabi judicial department noted that evidence of assault was visible on the woman's body. Despite the physical evidence and the charges against all six men, the criminal court also charged the woman with illicit sex, or sex outside marriage, which is punishable by imprisonment and flogging in the UAE. The prosecutor argued that the fact that she went for a drive with a man was sufficient proof that she consented to having sex.

A week later, during the second hearing, the woman retracted her statement, reportedly to avoid lashes and a jail sentence for extramarital sex. She said that she was beaten by her brother after he found out that she had been speaking to men, and that as a result, she decided to report that she had been raped.

On 13 June, the Abu Dhabi criminal court sentenced both the woman and her 19-year-old friend to one year in prison for engaging in consensual sex. The court acquitted all the men of rape, finding four of them guilty of less serious charges of "moral crime".

The UAE has made commendable strides in promoting women's education, entrepreneurship and political participation. When it comes to seeking justice for sexual violence, however, women in the UAE still face formidable – and often insurmountable – barriers.

Rape is a serious crime in the UAE, but the very act of reporting a rape automatically puts a woman in danger of being charged with illicit sex. The law places an almost impossible burden of proof on rape victims to show that sex was nonconsensual.

In a similar case reported earlier this year, a British woman told Dubai police that a hotel worker raped her while she was on vacation in Dubai with her fiancé to celebrate their engagement. The Dubai criminal court charged the woman and her fiancé with having sex outside marriage. The same court charged the hotel worker with rape.

When the couple provided documents to prove that they were planning to get married, the extramarital sex charges against them were dropped. But the court also freed the hotel worker, and the public prosecutor appears to have concluded that the woman had fabricated the story.

On top of risking prosecution, a rape survivor in the UAE is also likely to face ostracism by society, and even her family. For many Emiratis, a family's honour depends on a woman's good reputation, and society is quick to judge sexual assault victims as "immoral".

By making it almost impossible for a victim to prove rape, and then treating the brave few who choose to report rape as criminals, the UAE discriminates against women and violates their fundamental right to due process of the law. This treatment causes women to live in fear and makes the trauma of rape worse.

The UAE, first and foremost, urgently needs to reform its penal code and rules of evidence. Reporting a rape should never be grounds for charging a victim with illicit sex. And the UAE should ensure that consensual sex in private between adults is not a criminal offence.

The UAE should also improve law enforcement and judicial practices, and offer health and other services to sexual violence victims. Police, investigators, public prosecutors and judges should receive proper training to handle these cases, and policewomen with specialised training should be available to assist and support women who report rape. Instead of being thrown behind bars, rape victims should receive medical treatment, psychological counselling and other support services.

Finally, the UAE should do more to promote women's full equality in society, including combating stereotyped views concerning women's morality and sexuality. The UAE's law on illicit sex is not unusual in the region, but the government's public commitment to gender equality is. If the UAE is serious about promoting women's rights, it needs to ensure an effective response to sexual violence.

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Burj Khalifa claims world's highest mosque

The world’s tallest skyscraper – boasting 1,000-plus luxury apartments and a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani had last-minute name change from Burj Dubai (“Dubai Tower”) to Burj Khalifa. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan is the head of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates, which includes Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and five other emirates (or city-states).

Certainly the Burj Khalifa is meant to outshine Dubai’s many superlative projects so far, including a self-proclaimed seven-star hotel. The Dubai Tower’s 160-stories reach 828 meters high (2,716 feet) – a height kept secret until the opening Monday night.

The towering statistics, by contrast, have spilled across the media. It’s so tall that it’s visible from 60 miles away, reports say, and the temperature drops 6 degrees from base to peak. Winds at the top can reach 90 miles an hour. The highest floor offers views of Iran. Its elevators will travel the world’s longest distance. Its nightclub on the 143rd floor is the world’s highest; above it, on floor 158, the world’s highest mosque.

Throughout the day, government-owned channel Dubai One interviewed a parade of people praising the Burj Khalifa and showed montages of Sheikh Mohammed illustrating his vision and generosity – as well as an apparent penchant for constructing new buildings.

In one clip he urged 10,000 new housing units. In another, he sat down on a road to chat with a resident whose neighborhood had been damaged by rains and ask him what he needed. “My house needs repairs,” the man told him. “We won’t repair it,” Sheikh Mohammed told him. “We will build a new one.”

Human trafficking and UAE

More than one million people, the majority of them women and children, are smuggled across international borders to work in near slavery every year, the US state department says.

Its 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report lists more than 170 countries which it claims are not doing enough to tackle the problem.

Al Jazeera met "Svetlana", a Uzbek forced to work in the sex trade in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

She recounted how she was offered a job as a waitress, but the woman who had originally promised to help her in Tashkent took away her passport and threatened to harm her family if she did not co-operate.

After years of abuse, "Svetlana" has found refuge at the United Arab Emirates' first shelter for the victims of human trafficking.

Staff at the Abu Dhabi Shelter for Women and Children say that although her story is common, there is too little awareness of the situation.

UAE compensates slaved and abused child jockeys

Munna Mia was just five when his family flew to the Middle East to escape the hardships of Bangladesh -- but all that awaited him was a life of danger, pain and hunger as a child camel jockey.

His father, a bricklayer, had been offered a job in the United Arab Emirates by a recruitment agent who told him he could bring his wife and three children if he paid a 4,500-dollar fee.

Grinding poverty and a lack of jobs in Bangladesh drove Mia's father to scrape together some of the money by selling the land he owned and getting loans from family and friends.

The rest he borrowed from the agent, with the promise it would be repaid with money he earned in Dubai.

But the dreams of Mia and his family were shattered when they arrived, and he and his two brothers -- all aged between three and eight -- were forced to ride in camel races for long hours under the desert sun.

"We didn't get much to eat and every morning they would weigh us. If we were even a gram over 20 kilograms we would be beaten with a stick that gave us electric shocks," Mia told AFP.

"My brothers and I were separated from our parents and lived in a hostel with other jockeys.

"For a year, they trained us by just throwing us on top of a camel and I often fell off. I still have lots of problems because of all the injuries."

Mia and his brothers were among thousands of South Asian children used as camel jockeys in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states after being brought in by traffickers or under false pretences with their families.

"The hot sand would burn my feet. We'd come back at night and we were exhausted. Every day I'd wonder if I would die," said Mia, who rode in races until he was nine.

He seldom wore a helmet and his uniform was a cotton pair of shorts and T-shirt.

The UAE this week gave Bangladeshi authorities nearly 1.5 million dollars to compensate almost 900 former child jockeys for the injuries and abuse they suffered.

Bangladesh's deputy home affairs minister, Tanjim Ahmed, whose department is in charge of distributing the funds, said each child would get between 1,000 and 10,000 dollars depending on their circumstances.

The money would pay for their medical treatment and education, he said.

"Using children as camel jockeys was despicable. It stirred the world's conscience," Ahmed said, adding that the UAE government told him that robots were now being used in place of children.

The UAE officially banned child jockeys in 1993 although abuses remained widespread until 2005.

According to the UK-based human rights group, Anti-Slavery International, around 2,000 unaccounted for child camel jockeys have not yet returned to their families from the Gulf states.

Christine Jaulmes, a spokeswoman for the charity Unicef, which has helped track down former child jockeys, including Shameem, says: "We cannot trace all of the children who have been involved in camel racing.

"Also, many children were killed during racing by falling from the camels and so on, so we don't have a record of these children."

Many children will never find their way home. They are unable to identify their families and home communities and often do not speak their native language because they were put to work at such a young age.

Shameem is actually among the lucky ones. Now thirteen, he could receive up to $10,000 in compensation, a fortune for most Bangladeshis, 40 per cent of whom live on less than two dollars a day.

For his family, who are still struggling, this money is an answer to their prayers - finally they can see a path out of poverty.

Tanjim Ahmad, the Bangladeshi state minister who is managing the fund at the home affairs ministry, says he hopes the UAE compensation initiative "will encourage other countries to take the necessary steps to prevent child labour and to invest in anti-trafficking operations".

"We do appreciate the efforts [of] the UAE, once they identified the problem ... we intend to use those funds to rehabilitate those children affected by this horrible episode," he says.

For those children who are under 18 years of age, the government plans to put the money into trust funds that would pay the former jockeys interest until they come of age and can access the money.

In addition, funds will be made available from these accounts for families to pay school fees – an important part of rehabilitation and reintegration.

But, perhaps surprisingly, Shameen's family still dream of a better life back in the UAE.

Abul, now a carpenter, continues his battle against poverty and, although their experience in the UAE was heart-wrenching, he knows he can earn more money if they moved there again.

Perhaps they will eventually use their new found wealth to try anew. If they ever do return, one thing is for certain, Shameem and his brothers intend to stay as far away as possible from the camel track.