Yemen is less a country than a conflict, less a place than a newsreel of grainy footage, and, a slow news day aside, less concerning to us than our western morals will concede. War has pushed the Yemeni people to the small fractured spaces, where squeezed between hatred, fear, and bombs, they sit nameless in the gaps of history. An impersonal history, which identifies human trains of exodus as the displaced, which measures human loss with the cold logic of numbers, and which will decide, too late, who was right or wrong.
While history vacillates, the bombs are indiscriminate. After the billowing clouds of bomb blast rise, the debris settles in a black despair which drapes itself in veil-like folds across the faces of the bereaved. Rivers of grief-swollen tears leech life from the land, as famine falls in the deathly rain of the bombs. Disease gives life a translucent quality; follow the light and you can see through to the other side. The other side where 10,000 civilians haven't died a pointless death, where 14 million more aren't threatened by famine, and where Man City's owner isn't one of those responsible.
The strings may not be visible, but in much the same way as Dmitry Medvedev only playacted at being the President of Russia, so too does Sheikh Mansoor play the puppet. The gossamer threads of true power lead to the hands of Mohamed Bin Zayad Al Hahyan (MBZ), the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. With the assistance of his trusted lieutenant, Man City Chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, he has transformed the club into a lauded exemplar of what those in the know apparently believe modern ownership should look like. They may have a point; under the management of the City Football Group (CFG) the emerging ownership model challenges the very notion of what a football club can aspire to be. With a worldwide network of teams distributed across 5 continents, the community context, traditionally at the root of any club's identity, has been shifted from a local to a global footing. This shift is crucial as it enables CFG's pan-national structure to effectively double as a globalised framework around which Abu Dhabi's political influence can extend.
But why resort to such elaborate forms of backdoor diplomacy? The necessity is writ large in the headline findings of the UN's latest report on the war in Yemen. The UAE, of which Abu Dhabi is part, is accused of callously murdering thousands of civilians, indiscriminately targeting weddings, markets, hospitals, and homes during bombing raids, widespread torture, the exploitation of child soldiers, some as young as 8, and enabling an epidemic of rape. The charge in other words, though the UN characteristically tiptoes around it, is of committing war crimes. The mere insinuation of culpability represents a significant challenge to Abu Dhabi's ambitions on a global scale; the rather sticky tag of war criminal jarring in the gears of realpolitik. This is where CFG becomes invaluable. The notional dissociation between Abu Dhabi and CFG creates plausible deniability for powerful elites who may otherwise be sensitive about conducting business deals, in the full glare of public opinion, with war criminals. This diplomatic sleight of hand reveals the true dynamic; CFG is to Abu Dhabi what the Bada Bing strip club was to the Sopranos, a legitimate front for a criminal enterprise.
A criminal enterprise which, as illustrated by the UAE's deplorable human rights record, is equally heavy handed on the domestic front. Freedom of expression is severely curtailed, outspoken critics of the regime can expect to face punitive measures, ranging from arbitrary detention to forcible disappearance to, in cases which meet muddily defined legal criteria, the death penalty. In terms of women's rights, the penal code crystallises female subordination, best exemplified by the fact that domestic violence, including marital rape, is legally permissible. Homosexuality is effectively considered an abomination, the crime of "unnatural sex" carrying a prison term of up to 14 years. Furthermore, migrant workers, despite some recent reforms, remain vulnerable to gross exploitation. It's in this context we should reflect on the fact that while Abu Dhabi was launching its takeover bid for Manchester City, 8 princesses from the ruling Al Nahyan family, were found guilty in absentia of slavery charges in a Belgium court. But, even this is a trifling concern compared with the slavery scandal centred on the UAE's child camel jockeys.
With the influx of petrodollars in the 1950s and 60s the traditional pastoral way of life in Abu Dhabi was lost to modernity. Change was rapid, in fact too rapid in some ways. Local traditions were overtaken by newfound affluence and a cultural vacuum sucked daily routines into its nothingness. Step forward the moneyed elite who, keen to backstop their nascent authority on the impression that they were cultural guardians, re-imagined what had previously been the largely ceremonial practice of camel racing as something altogether more competitive. However, since unlike horses, camels cannot be fitted with stirrups designed to redistribute weight, success was even more contingent on the physical size of the jockey. Hence, keen to bathe like reclining Cleopatras in the asses milk of adulation and prestige, the Sheikhs turned to child jockeys, which in turn created a market for illegally trafficked children. Though the use of jockeys under 18 is now banned, at its height the scale of the illicit trade in humanity remains mind-boggling; between the mid 1970s and 2005, some 15,000 children from Pakistan's Rahimyar Khan region alone were smuggled into the UAE. Moreover, the dots linking the UAE to Rahimyar Khan specifically are connected by the fact that the Al Hahyan family have a palace in that region of Pakistan.
The sport itself is brutally dangerous, children, after being hurled from their mounts under the galloping hooves of competing camels, often died or suffered severe brain or spinal cord injuries. Such injuries, despite their severity, were commonly greeted with indifference, as trampled jockeys were routinely dumped in the back of vans and left to suffer untreated. Away from the racetrack conditions were little better. Pay was nominal if any, beatings were routine, sexual abuse was rife, electric shocks were doled out as punishment, deliberate underfeeding left children malnourished, genitals were maliciously crushed; the inhumanity even included the murder of recalcitrant jockeys. Whispered rumours of abuse grew into cries for justice. International condemnation of the exploitative practice reached a head, when in 2006, the US law firm Motley Rice filed a lawsuit accusing the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, of child slavery. The UAE's response was an all out PR onslaught which sought to achieve the seemingly impossible and recast slave masters as humanitarian reformers. The first step was to hire UNICEF to lend a veneer of validity to a repatriation and compensation scheme, which in addition to capping payments at $1,000 for former jockeys and $5,000 for the families of jockeys who had died, forced recipients to sign away the right to seek financial redress elsewhere. When you consider that Pep Guardiola earns £15 million per annum to manage a football team, the scheme is revealed for what it really was, yet another injustice for the helpless. But thanks in part to UNICEF's feeble obsequiousness which exalted the "visionary leaders" of the UAE and their promise of "long-term protection and development of all affected children", the PR ruse quickly gained traction. The next step involved a little diplomatic schmoozing; sweet nothings were whispered into Condoleeza Rice's ear about the UAE's contribution to the war on terror and after similar sentiments were expressed to George W. Bush, the case, like sins in the confessional box, magically disappeared.
For the UAE regime, truth is a business proposition to be haggled over. Briefing notes show that MBZ was prepared to offer British businesses substantial drilling concessions and arms deals in return for David Cameron's "help" with the BBC. In the USA, Michael Rubin was "convinced" to pen an article undermining Human Rights Watch's research on torture in the UAE. But the thing is that such transactions are no different from how Man City's luminous football manufactures consent. Isn't it curious that whereas the debt funded takeover of Manchester Utd by an avaricious, though otherwise more or less benign, Malcolm Glazer generated a rabid froth of green and gold scarf wearing protest, that the purchase of City, by human rights abusers, was greeted as a veritable second coming. The reality is that the contrast doubles as a dark mirror on football, portraying it as a sport willing to define its moral principles in terms of money, success, and entertainment, rather than as an expression of compassion for human beings. Against this backdrop and his deafening silence on abuses in the UAE, the symbolism of Guardiola's yellow ribbon, which boldly proclaims his affinity with the Catalan people, becomes meaningless. Pep needs to remember that since human rights are necessarily universal, advocacy for rights must also be; there is no hierarchy of humanity, we're all equal. Sadly for discriminatory regimes, this manifestly isn't the case, some are more equal than others. A child in Yemen or a former camel jockey, would have a tough time reconciling the charitable ethos of the "global projects" listed on Manchester City's webpage with their own experiences, as well as a very different interpretation of the term "life changing".
Questions must also be asked of football's administrators. The FA's Owners and Directors Test, which is conceived as a legal device to prevent clubs falling into unscrupulous hands, lacks the ethical scope to prevent takeovers by questionable regimes such as Abu Dhabi. As the effective custodian of football in the UK, the FA needs to address such shortcomings and prioritise the long term ethical stature of the game. However, events may have already overtaken them. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have already made efforts to establish a $25 billion World Club Championship, which in essence constitutes a bid to usurp UEFA and win control of the elite club game. The degree to which the pair have inveigled their way into the game's upper echelons, is illustrated by the identity of their chief backer in this enterprise, none other than Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA.
The beauty of Manchester City's football lightens the soul, but it is impossible to divorce the divinity of the vision from the message it asks you to believe. Bill Shankly was half right, football isn't as important as life and death, it's much less so.
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