EmailKamal swats away a swarm of black desert flies from his face as he pours coffee from a battered tin pot. His calloused hands are shaking as he looks furtively at his 'watchman' standing outside in the courtyard.
'If we are caught speaking to you here, we are finished, you understand that? They will throw me in prison and deport everyone in this camp, not just the people in this room. They are actively looking for us,' he tells me.
The construction workers, packed together inside the tiny hut in one of Dubai's harsh desert labour camps, are breaking the most fundamental of all the draconian laws governing immigrants within the United Arab Emirates - they are holding a union meeting, a practice that is banned in all but one of the Gulf States. They are also plotting their next move in protest at their treatment by their Arab employers who, they claim, exploit them for cheap labour. It's a move that will, for the first time, involve direct confrontation with the millions of tourists who visit the city every year. They plan to shame foreigners into taking notice of their plight.
Dubai, one of the country's seven emirates and uniquely poor in oil, is at the pinnacle of a decade-long building boom that has transformed the city into one of the world's most popular tourist destinations. Today it is the largest construction site in the Middle East, home to luxurious hotels and three of the largest shopping malls on the planet. Each year an estimated 700,000 Britons visit the city to take advantage of its sunshine and pristine beaches. Record numbers from the UK are shunning the Spanish costas to buy property in the region. By 2008 an estimated 250,000 Britons will call Dubai their second home.
The city's unrivalled building frenzy may be creating one of the Middle East's most modern and alluring holiday destinations, but it is supported by an increasingly disgruntled foreign labour force whose basic human right - the right to voice their opinion - is denied. 'One of the world's largest construction booms is feeding off impoverished immigrant workers in Dubai, but they're treated as less than human,' said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
A recent report by the group painted a deeply disturbing picture of immigrant lives in the UAE. It claimed that bleak living conditions, combined with long working hours and unacceptably low pay, had led to rising suicide rates among foreign workers in Dubai. In 2005, 80 Indian residents took their lives, up from 67 in 2004. In addition, an estimated 880 foreign workers died in accidents on UAE construction sites.
In recent months, though, the UAE's vast population of foreign workers have begun to fight back. They have already staged sporadic strikes to protest at low pay. Women brought in to work as domestic servants are running away in record numbers. A fortnight ago, in the biggest outbreak of public dissent in the UAE's history, thousands of workers rioted at the construction site for the Burj Dubai Tower, which by 2008 will become the world's tallest building.
Angered by withheld payments and mistreatment by their employers, some 2,500 labourers turned on their bosses and the local police, smashing cars and offices on the site and causing an estimated $1m of damage. In a sympathy strike a day later, thousands of labourers working at Dubai International Airport laid down their tools.
According to 36-year-old Kamal (not his real name), who spearheaded the Burj Dubai protest, more needs to be done. 'These protests received attention in the press and were forgotten about, we need to do more. I was involved in a sit-down protest on the motorway last month, but the police came along with sticks and beat us on the backs and head. Many of my friends were hospitalised and deported. The riot got a lot of attention, but things haven't improved for us. We already know what we have to do next, we take our protests into the malls and to the beaches. Our situation needs international attention and only by unsettling tourists can we achieve this. They need to see how desperate we really are.'
Before dawn every morning of the week Kamal folds up his blanket, steps over 11 other men sleeping in decrepit bunks in a stuffy, windowless room, and journeys to work in a chartered company bus which takes him past the shopping malls and $1,000-a-night hotels.
Five years ago the father-of-four paid about $2,000 for a three-year work visa to come to Dubai. When he got here, he had to turn over his passport as security to pay back the loan, as most foreign workers do. His working week, fitting steel sheeting on to the sides of skyscrapers in temperatures of more than 40C, with no protective clothing, has left his hands badly scarred and his back in severe pain.
'I work seven days a week, about 70 hours as a steel fitter. In a good month I manage to send about 4,000 rupees [£60] home every month, the rest of my money goes to paying off my loan to come here. I normally go home and see my wife and daughters for a month each year, although I haven't been home for a year and a half. I can't afford the flight. I'm fighting to see my family, we all are.'
The immigrants are angry not only at pay and working conditions on the building sites, but at the sub-standard accommodation given to them by construction firms. Despite claims by contractors and the authorities in the UAE that the camps were being improved, many of the sites visited by The Observer in Sanapour, on the desert approaches to Dubai, told an entirely different story, with immigrants crammed into tiny pre-fabricated huts, 12 men to a room, forced to wash themselves in filthy brown water and cook in kitchens next to overflowing toilets.
On the surface, the Dubai authorities have seemingly tried to respond to the concerns. Last week Ali al-Kaabi, the UAE's Labour Minister, revealed that a newly proposed law may give labourers the right to form trade unions and bargain collectively. But he said intelligence he had received suggested radical tactics were being deployed in workplaces by militant left-wing Indian and Pakistanis intent on disrupting society. Kaabi said those who rioted and were in prison will be prosecuted. 'They will be deported if they are found guilty,' he said. 'That will be used as a lesson to others.'
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