....In broken English, she explained that she had arrived in Dubai 28 days earlier, having been promised a job as a maid. Instead, human smugglers known as snakeheads sold her to a madam who forced her to pay off a debt by selling sex here. She trembled as she said that she just wanted to go home.
Her story was not unusual. A night earlier in another mega-bordello located in the three-star York International Hotel in the tony Bur Dubai neighbourhood, a 30-year-old Uzbek told me she had to pay off a $10,000 debt or "the mafia will kill my children."
In the Cyclone, every woman who spoke with me in depth explained that traffickers had taken their passports away as collateral until they paid off a debt. Alina, a bleach-blonde from northern Romania, sat forlornly smoking and playing electronic solitaire along the back wall. She had a raspy voice, and a sallow complexion that made her appear much older than her 23 years. She came here in 2004, after divorcing the alcoholic father of her three-year-old son. A Romanian woman in Dubai had promised her work as a waitress in a local restaurant.
When the woman met Alina at the airport, she told her what her real work would be. Without her passport, without any money, without any local contacts, she had no choice but to go with the woman to the Cyclone. From then on, her life was a blur of clients -- American, European, Indian, and mostly Arab. Some men purchased oral sex in the "VIP Room" above the bar, but they normally took Alina to a hotel or apartment. They were often violent.
"Many problem customers," she said, particularly among the Arabs.
Every morning at six she would return to the apartment of the madam, an abusive woman who took all the money. For Alina's efforts she was given one meal a day, coffee and cigarettes.
Strange how the mainstream media seems to produce large numbers of stories about Dubai without noticing its horrific abuse of infidels. For example, here's how the liberal economist Steven Levitt describes foreign workers in a New York Times blog:
All they seemed to care about was the fact that they make good wages, have a nice lifestyle, and are free from crime.