VICE (2013) s04e10 Episode Script

1 This week on "VICE": Forced labor in Dubai.
(man speaking foreign language) The Trump International Golf Club, is that where you worked recently? And then, the impact of China's massive investment in Africa.
And what did you think when you first moved here? Very free country.
(chuckling) (speaking French) (theme music playing) Crowd (chanting): Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! "VICE" correspondent Ben Anderson first reported on slave labor in the United Arab Emirates eight years ago.
We're going to see what conditions are like on this, which is one of the most high profile projects in the whole of Dubai.
During a recent investigation, he discovered some of the worst conditions he'd ever seen on a development bearing the name of a man who just might be our next president.
Anderson: The United Arab Emirates, and Dubai in particular, are often sold as a paradise in the Middle East.
Home to the world's largest and most luxurious malls, hotels and golf courses, promising unprecedented luxury for the few who can afford it.
So this is Sheikh Zayed Road, one of the most famous landmarks in Dubai.
Billions and billions of dollars of real estate, and then literally in the shadows of that is this slum.
So the hundreds of thousands of men who actually built Dubai, this is where they live.
The UAE's record on migrant worker's rights is well known, so we started our investigation by looking at NYU.
When they were enticed into Abu Dhabi, they established their own labor standards so that subcontractors building their campus would treat their workers fairly.
Those standards were tested when one group of workers went on strike.
They live two hours drive away from the campus site in Dubai.
So this is one of the many labor camps in Dubai, and there are just dozens of huge buildings that look like a cross between warehouses and prisons.
This is the Dubai that most tourists who come never see.
Striking is strictly illegal in the UAE, but these workers eventually felt like they had no other option.
(speaking foreign language) So can you describe how the company reacted when you went on strike? Anderson: Most workers have to take out loans to get to the UAE.
Being deported means going home saddled with debt, and no way of paying it off.
The strike was covered by "The New York Times," a week before a lavish commencement ceremony featuring former President Bill Clinton, who was forced to address the issue.
When this story came out, the university and the government promised to look into the charges, and if the charges were well founded, to take appropriate remedial action promptly.
Anderson: What the government actually did was call the journalist who broke the story in for questioning.
Well, I was told to meet the spokesperson for Abu Dhabi police in a bar.
You recorded this meeting? (man speaking) Anderson: After letting him know he was in trouble, they offered a way out.
As you can see here in the transcript, the police chief wanted a monthly report.
Any foreign journalists who were coming to the UAE, I was to write a report on why they're in the UAE, what their agenda was You'd be spying on foreign journalists as well, for them? Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes.
What happened? You said to them you're not accepting the offer? I said, "Yeah, yeah.
" I listened to it and everything, and then I left the country pretty soon after that.
And then when I came back, I was arrested at the airport, and then I was deported.
Anderson: After commissioning an independent report, NYU admitted real lapses and promised to pay compensation to 10,000 workers.
The UAE is run by absolute monarchies.
With no freedom of expression and no right to protest or form unions, it's routine to exploit the laborers who are building almost $400 billion worth of construction projects currently underway in Dubai alone.
There are roughly five million migrant workers in the UAE, making up over half the population.
Some of these workers let us into their homes, but to keep them safe, we had to conceal their identities.
So this is two buildings with a bit of corrugated iron across the middle.
It looks a bit like a communal kitchen, washing area.
So when some people leave, other people come in and take their place on the floor? Cancel the visa? In the next room, we met workers who had similar stories, but were working for a subcontractor building a golf course bearing the name of one of America's leading presidential candidates.
There is a big development called the Trump International Golf Club.
Is that where you worked recently? Is this the entrance? When you were at home in Pakistan, what were you told that made you want to come to Dubai? If you could have anything, all you would want is to be promised the 10 dirhams per hour, that's three dollars, roughly, instead of the five dirhams, $1.
50, that you are being paid.
That's all you ask for.
Did you have to pay a visa fee? So, at the money you are being paid now, how long will it take you just to pay off the visa fee? Anderson: So that's two years' work, just to break even.
And these men are charged nearly another year's salary for a visa renewal fee.
Charging the workers these fees is illegal here in the UAE.
Why don't you just go home? If you're not actually making money here? Anderson: And there's another illegal but commonly used tactic for subcontractors to keep the workers in place.
How many of you, when you arrived, had your passports taken away by the company? Anderson: These workers now find themselves trapped, and working on a development which bears both Trump's name and face, helping to sell the million dollar plus homes that will soon be complete.
Trump himself came to formally launch the project.
We're building Trump International Golf Club, and it's going to be spectacular.
Right in Dubai, and it's going to be something very, very special.
Anderson: I visited the same showroom to see how it's now being sold.
Anderson: Good to meet you.
Good, thank you.
And the golf course is another Trump International Golf Course? Does he just give his name to the development or is he involved in Right.
So Trump does the bigger villas, the golf course, the clubhouse.
Yeah.
In the UK, sometimes in the newspaper, you read stories about how the laborers who come from India, Pakistan, like they get treated very badly.
So it's important for us to know, like So DAMAC and Trump, they treat them-- they treat them good? Yeah? Never had any issues? Oh, good.
We don't want to move in, and then one year later hear a story about-- Yeah.
Anderson: Dr.
Nicholas McGeehan of Human Rights Watch has been documenting migrant worker abuse for over a decade.
He wasn't surprised by our findings.
Almost everyone we interviewed, they sort of describe being promised one thing in their home countries, and they're arriving and getting a nasty shock.
What happens, yes, is workers sign a contract in, wherever, Bangladesh, you know, and they arrive in the UAE, they find that they sign another contract for half of what they were promised.
Then, their passports are taken away from them.
Then, their visa costs and travel costs are added on.
So very quickly they move from a situation where they owe double what they thought they owed, and they're paid half of what they expected to be paid.
Their passport's gone, and they're bound to the one employer and can't change.
Very quickly it starts to look like, in many cases, a trafficking network because of the deception involved in their recruitment.
And when they're there, in the worst cases, you actually have workers subjected to forced labor.
The workers don't want much.
They just want what they were promised, which isn't a whole lot.
The system has been built up in such a way that everybody knows they can make money.
Nothing to be gained from being ethical.
Why would you be ethical when you can make so much money from being unethical, and you're never going to be prosecuted for it? The Dubai that's sold to you in tourist brochures and is emblazoned across every building you can see or adverts, it doesn't reflect the actual reality, which is a lot darker.
Anderson: Trump declined to be interviewed for this piece, but his organization stated: They instead put the responsibility on Trump's UAE partner, DAMAC, who told us: The Trump organization added that if any labor infractions were proven, they would insist that DAMAC investigate.
So even by the unbelievably low standards of Dubai, the guys living 18 or 21 to a villa are getting treated really, really badly.
But just to make sure that the company doing that to them isn't one bad apple, I am going to follow back a bunch of other buses ferrying workers who are still working on the Trump golf course to see how they are getting treated, and see how it compares to the guys we have already met.
We followed buses full of workers as they left the site.
They drove for miles out of the city and into the desert.
Eventually, there wasn't even a road.
After a two hour drive, they reached their destination.
Stuck in the middle of nowhere, this camp was also awful, and we heard many of the same stories.
Anderson: They're working on the golf course? Akoya and Trump? Yeah.
How many people share this? Ah, so one gas hob with two things is for one room.
So this small kitchen serves roughly 150 workers.
Must be very busy in here at dinner time.
Just outside the kitchen door was a bathroom that didn't look fit for human beings.
This is shower? This is the washing area, bathroom? Ugh.
You can smell the sewage.
Is it better here or in Pakistan? It's better at home.
Can you go home? Anderson: Whatever his stated level of involvement, Trump makes lots of money from licensing his name and brand to projects like this.
But while that might be ethically dubious for a businessman, one would think it would raise serious questions for a presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, the workers in Dubai remain trapped, with no hope that things might change.
Anderson: Yeah.
Do you think there's any chance things will improve? China's economy has seen incredible growth since they embraced the free market 40 years ago.
And one of the major factors that keeps this industrial juggernaut going is China's multi-billion dollar trade and investment deals in developing countries in Africa.
Now that's having a huge impact on modernization efforts on the continent, but what we wanted to find out is what Africa's giving up in return.
(crowd cheering) Yeung: And it appears to be working.
China has leveraged its influence across the continent with these enormous gifts, surpassing Britain, France, and the US.
as Africa's leading foreign business partner.
We spoke with Dr.
Paul Tembe, a China studies analyst, about the broader implications of this phenomenon.
What is the kind of scale that we're looking at when it comes to China's presence in Africa? What about politically and socially? Yeung: This type of pro-Chinese influence, you see all across Africa.
(speaking Chinese) Especially in the Congo.
In Kinshasa, the Chinese sponsored development is happening everywhere.
Moise Ekanga, one of the country's main negotiators with the Chinese, showed us around.
(speaking French) This is like a mini Tiananmen Square? Yeah.
(woman speaking) (Yeung) (woman) (speaking Chinese) How much of the city is built by the Chinese? Seventy percent? That's a lot.
Yeung: Much of this infrastructure was funded by the $6.
2 billion trade contract that was originally signed by the two governments in 2008.
(speaking French) One of the things that the West sees is that China and the DRC are becoming closer and closer.
And with that, China gets more and more power, and more and more say over the potential politics and the direction of the country.
What do you say to that? Can we get a tour of Sicomines through you? I think you're able to arrange that for us, right? Yes, we will do it.
Excellent.
Yeung: We're at the Sicomines mine in Kolwezi, which is the biggest infrastructure for resources deal that this country has ever, ever seen.
And the scale of this is insanely huge.
There are about 3,000 workers working here.
They've only just started production last week, but things are well under way here.
And there's a lot of Chinese people following us with cameras, scrutinizing our every move.
Hi.
(speaks Chinese) (nervous laughter) Uh (speaking Chinese) We were told by Mr.
Moise Ekanga that we had full access to this mine, and we thought we could interview the people here and talk about the deal, and it turns out, that now we've got here, no one wants to go on camera to actually answer any specific questions.
To find out why the Chinese workers might be hesitant to talk about Sicomines, we met with the former speaker of Congo's assembly, Vital Kamerhe.
(speaking French) Does the average Congolese person benefit at all from this deal? Contracts like the Sicomines deal have spurred an enormous wave of Chinese investment across the continent.
In the DRC, Chinese entrepreneurs are rapidly gaining ground in the mining industry.
(speaking Chinese) Yeung: Most of these Chinese businessmen are wary of Western press.
But we did find one who was happy to open up.
We are in a golf course in Congo, and I'm about to play my first game of golf, ever, with Mr.
Tang and his friend, both of whom are Chinese entrepreneurs.
I believe this is called a driver.
Just a practice swing.
(laughing) Yeung: How is life for you, living out here? And what did you think when you first moved here? What were your impressions? Free? (speaking Chinese) (chuckling) Yeung: Olivier Tang is the owner of Da Tang Steel, a company that specializes in making steel balls to pulverize raw ore.
Can I ask how much you pay your Congolese workers? Is it easy to find people to come and work for that salary? Yeung: Critics have argued that the low wages Chinese companies pay are part of a broader pattern of labor exploitation.
We met with a former employee of CDM, one of the biggest Chinese smelting firms in the Congo.
(speaking French) What was the Chinese manager's reaction when you got these burns? Yeung: CDM didn't respond to our request for comment.
But human rights groups have uncovered additional claims of abuse from company workers, including low pay, safety neglect, and physical abuse.
A number of protests and strikes over issues like these have sprung up all over Africa, several of which have ended in violence.
But that hasn't stopped the stunning pace of economic growth here.
China has taken advantage of this growth by diversifying its interests into all sectors of the economy.
And as cities like Nairobi solidify their positions as global capitals, it's Chinese companies that are there to help them build.
Why do you think that the Kenyan government chooses Chinese companies to build these kind of buildings? (speaking Chinese) Yeung: The centerpiece of the Kenyan development boom is the new Standard Gauge Railway, which will run from the port city of Mombasa to the capital.
Yeung: How much is this project costing? How big is that in the history of Kenyan loans? Who is actually going to pay for that? And do you think that's fair? To the Kenyans? Yeung: But the terms of Kenya's deal with China have come in for harsh criticism from economists like David Ndii.
Yeung: And even though the growth of the Chinese economy has slowed, its commitment to Africa has not wavered.
(speaking Chinese) Yeung: President Xi Jinping announced that China would triple his country's investment in Africa to $60 billion.
Yeung: And that's exactly what China is doing, as its foreign investment model and its influence are quickly spreading around the world.
So if China continues with its non-interference policy, surely, it's propping up corrupt governments throughout Africa? There is no doubt that the rise of China and Africa, a country which never was our colonizer, will have a far-reaching impact in international relations.
Long live the Africa-China cooperation.
Yeung: What is Africa's significance when it comes to the West versus the East and the battle for ideologies? China is not a democratic country.
Do you see that as playing out to be more of an issue in the future of Africa?