Читать книгу Sinews of War and Trade - Laleh Khalili - Страница 24

Delicate aluminium girders

Project phantom aerial masts

Swaying crane and derrick

Above the sea’s just surging deck.

Stephen Spender, ‘Air Raid Across the Bay at Plymouth’

Dubai’s next maritime transport project was an even larger mechanised port to relieve the congestion of the now-deepened creek harbour. Halcrow was again involved in the surveys for what eventually became Port Rashid at the entrance to the creek. The British projections for Dubai trade formed the basis for the 1967 port plans, even as Shaikh Rashid (and his Scottish economic adviser, Bill Duff) argued for four times as many berths as Halcrow allowed. When Port Rashid was inaugurated in 1971, it was already congested and had to be expanded to thirty-seven berths by the end of that decade.²⁸ The congestion of the port had everything to do with the independence of Aden from British colonial yoke. Dubai benefitted from revolution and war in Southern Arabia as shipping and bunkering businesses moved their base there from Aden. By the late 1970s, Port Rashid was the largest port in the Gulf, and typical of the ports of its time: still close to the commercial centre of the city, capable of serving large container ships, and later complemented with a drydock suitable for repairing crude carriers, liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessels, and dredgers. Shaikh Rashid had appointed the British shipping firm Gray McKenzie to manage the port, consolidating the old and powerful colonial company’s reach into new Dubai’s commercial life. The old Creek harbour was in turn transformed into a dhow port.

Even before the expansion of Port Rashid, however, Shaikh Rashid (or his advisers) planned for a much larger port about forty-five kilometres south of Port Rashid, very close to the border with Abu Dhabi. This border area had been contested for some time between the two emirates, with the dispute only settled in 1968. Rashid’s placement of the new port there was not only an act of commercial foresight but of sovereign prerogative. The lore behind the genesis of Jabal Ali has Shaikh Rashid, a kind of hagiographic archetype of the wise and visionary ruler, standing astride a dune on the windswept and beautiful sand flats of Jabal Ali, striking his staff on the ground in 1976 and declaring that a new port would be built there. And it was. The construction of Jabal Ali consolidated Rashid’s claim over the contested borderland. It was also intended to send a message to Saudi Arabia, which had just begun an ambitious maritime construction project in Jubail and Yanbu, also planned by Halcrow.²⁹

Notwithstanding the Orientalist fantasy of a visionary shaikh calling infrastructures into being, there is something extravagantly modernist about making the largest artificial harbour in the world – as in Jabal Ali – without regard to the obvious unsuitability of the site, both geologically and geopolitically. It is wildly optimistic to ignore natural topographies in trying to make harbours conform to the demands of ever larger ships, especially on the shores of a sea that is so shallow and so prone to capricious undersea currents that continually shape and reshape the seabed and affect its depth. Jabal Ali was constructed in record time, and with it a free zone whose enterprise was crucial for the early growth in trade and custom at the port. A vast amount of sand and stone had to be dredged, which was then used to reclaim the port’s built-up area. Shaikh Rashid gave the management contract for Jabal Ali to the US-based SeaLand company, which was originally founded by Malcom McLean, the inventor of the twenty-foot shipping container.³⁰ Both SeaLand and Gray McKenzie, however, gave way to the Dubai Port Authority, which took over managing Jabal Ali and Port Rashid in 1991. Dubai Port Authority merged with Dubai Ports International in 2005, forming Dubai Ports World.³¹ Today, Jabal Ali is the busiest container port in the Middle East and is always included in top-ten lists of the world’s container terminals.³² It is typical of today’s container ports: vast, distant from the town centre, and thoroughly and entirely secured.

Port	2016 Rank	2016 Volume (million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units or TEUs)	2017 Rank	2017 Volume (million TEUs)
Shanghai, China	1	37.13	1	40.23
Singapore	2	30.90	2	33.67
Shenzhen, China	3	23.97	3	25.21
Ningbo-Zhoushan, China	4	21.60	4	24.61
Busan, South Korea	5	19.85	6	20.49
Hong Kong, S.A.R., China	6	19.81	5	20.77
Guangzhou Harbour, China	7	18.85	7	20.35
Qingdao, China	8	18.01	8	18.31
Jabal Ali, Dubai, UAE	9	14.77	9	15.37
Tianjin, China	10	14.49	10	15.07
Port Klang, Malaysia	11	13.20	12	11.98
Rotterdam, Netherlands	12	12.38	11	13.73
Khor Fakkan, UAE	37	4.33	43 (combined with all other Sharjah ports)	3.8
			78 (ranked alone)	2.32
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia	40	3.96	36	4.15
Salalah, Oman	46	3.32	39	3.94
Port Said East, Egypt	50	3.04	56	2.97
Dammam, Saudi Arabia	86	1.78	97	1.58
King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia	100	1.40	89	1.69

Table 2.1 – World’s top container ports³³

During my research, I desperately wanted to visit Jabal Ali port, but had immense trouble getting an entry permission. Most port workers from whom I requested interviews offered to meet me outside its perimeter. I managed to visit the port eventually by travelling there twice, aboard two different container ships. The second time, arriving at midnight, the sea near Jabal Ali coruscated with the reflection of innumerable ships’ lights as they awaited the call to enter the channel towards the port. When we were finally given permission to enter the channel, we were at the head of a small convoy of ships all traversing along the slightly bent route of the channel, towards the port, in the hot early-morning haze of August 2016. I was struck by the sheer scale of the port and the engineering that had made it possible: a channel deep enough to accommodate the very largest container ships, so much land reclamation, so many security fences, and beyond them the endless Jabal Ali Free Zone stretching to the murky horizon. The Admiralty Charts that mapped our approach also showed this vast port, all of it reclaimed and dredged, the roadstead wholly engineered. On the chart itself, the waters were shallow, the shorelines drawn straight as if with a ruler, the Palm Jabal Ali’s artificial islands marked as incomplete while recognisable in their duplication of the contours of other Palm islands further up the coast. Unfinished terminals and breakwaters also appear on the map. The port, heaving with activity and exhaling haze and pollution, is constantly metamorphosing, expanding, convulsing with production and trade.

The material needed for all this construction and manufacture had to come from somewhere, especially as the pace of commerce, town planning, and the fashioning of infrastructures gathered in the 1960s and 1970s, raising the demand for cement and sand, aggregate and stone. The UAE did not acquire a cement factory until 1975.³⁴ Most of the cement was imported from Japan and other sources. Even the sand and stone required for the construction of harbours in Abu Dhabi and Dubai had to come from somewhere. Ghalilah and Khor Khwair in the poorer northern emirate of Ras al-Khaimah became the source for aggregate for construction in 1963 and thereafter.³⁵ The first jetties in Ras al-Khaimah were built at the behest of Abu Dhabi in 1966, to facilitate the extraction of aggregate for the construction of Abu Dhabi’s Port Zayed. The proximity of Ras al-Khaimah’s quarries in the mountains to the new jetty on the shore and the quality of the mountain rocks, rich in silicate and limestone, made the emirate an ideal source for construction material. Precisely because these construction materials were so precious and so necessary for the expansion of the UAE’s infrastructures, extracting them was not without conflict. Local groups clashed with one another and with the ruler over rights of access and profits from their richer southern neighbour’s exploitation of these coveted commodities.³⁶

The building of harbours and ports in the UAE has grown apace. Today, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Fujairah, and Ras al-Khaimah all have major oceangoing ports as well as a number of smaller harbours and oil terminals on and offshore. In 2012, Abu Dhabi inaugurated Port Khalifa, a mere seventy kilometres south of Dubai’s Jabal Ali. Port Khalifa replaces Port Zayed, which is centrally located within the city of Abu Dhabi, and will soon be ‘redeveloped’. Abu Dhabi has clearly followed the precedent set by Jabal Ali: a vast free zone (Khalifa Industrial Zone Abu Dhabi, or Kizad) benefitting from proximity to an oceangoing port with deep channels. Whether Khalifa will ever be as significant a cargo port as Jabal Ali has to do not only with economic calculations and incentives but also the push and pull between the rival emirates. Khalifa itself is built on land reclaimed from the sea and sits astride forty million cubic metres of materials dredged from the access channels and harbour area. Although its construction included a breakwater meant to protect a rare coral reef near the site, an environmental impact assessment by Halcrow produced at the start of the project indicated that there was very little environmental data available as a baseline. Nor had there been any consultation on environmental impact before the master plan was put forward. Like so many other ports in the region, it displays a gaping chasm between the discourse of preservation and the practice of port-building.

The story of Dubai is emblematic of other port-states of the British Empire. Dubai may be ridiculed as a kind of mirage in the desert and an embodiment of hubris, but neither its headlong rush to capitalisation nor its mercantile history nor even its ignominious story of exploitation of migrant workers and hierarchies of expertise and management are too dissimilar from Singapore or Hong Kong. In its constant scramble for ever-deeper harbours; in its ruthless moulding, whittling, and carving up of sea into land and land into more land; in its stories of colonial control and decision-making; even in the self-serving legends told about its visionary local leaders, Dubai is like so many other nodes in the great matrix of commerce and capital worldwide. As Jabal Ali rises, Port Rashid becomes something else – serving passengers, not cargo, while the commerce seeping from the skin of Jabal Ali’s vast port and free zone keeps the engines of dhows, feeder ships, intermodal transport vehicles, and even air cargo well-lubricated.

With the transformations of Ports Rashid and Zayed in the Emirates and Port Qabus in Muscat into cruise-ship ports, as in other ports throughout the Peninsula and beyond, old ports close to the cities and embedded in the thriving life of the urban quarters begin to disappear or cease functioning in the lively way they had done at their inauguration. In his account of the decline of European ports, Allan Sekula writes:

Harbors are now less havens (as they were for the Dutch) than accelerated turning basins for supertankers and containerships. The old harbour front, its links to a common culture shattered by unemployment, is now reclaimed for a bourgeois reverie on the mercantilist past. Heavy metals accumulate in the silt … The backwater becomes the frontwater. Everyone wants a glimpse of the sea.³⁷

The new cargo ports that replace city-centre ports are vast, securitised, and far from the heart of the city, nearly impossible to access. The transformation of the old ports into places of entertainment, consumption, and tourism resonates with the inception of semi-automated cargo ports. ‘Technology, trade and tourism’ (the motto of Dubai), the far port, the ‘accelerated turning basins’, environmental impact assessments as afterthoughts, and automation are all fundamental to the working of economies of these modern free ports, where ecological degradation and exploitation of labour are obscured in the haze of efficient commercial functioning and the technological sublime of colourful cargo boxes. So much of this history is tinged by colonial decision-making.