A country for a plaything
Recently there has been a flurry of stories about foreigners being jailed in the United Arab Emirates for unbelievably petty drug “offences” which would not be detected, yet alone prosecuted, anywhere else. The story of Raymond “Grooverider” Bingham, the Radio 1 “Xtra” DJ who got four years after mistakenly taking his supply of weed into the country, stands as a hard-luck case but much the same would happen in many western countries. However, some of those sentenced to the mandatory four-year term were not carrying drugs in the conventional sense at all, but merely had traces of it on their clothes or even the sole of their shoe.
The most recent case involves one Cat Le-Huy, a German national who is the head of technology at the Endemol TV production company. I do not have much time for the man or his company, best known for producing the Big Brother freak-show, but his drug conviction concerns 0.03g of hahsish, which is not detectable to the naked eye. His friend claims that Mr Le-Huy “hates marijuana” because of the effect it has on his health and because he has asthma, and that the authorities there have refused to co-operate with their requests for independent analysis.
Fair Trials International note that the UAE bans a number of substances which are perfectly legal elsewhere: people have been jailed there for having three poppy seeds in their clothes from having a bun with them on at Heathrow, or for having a substance like codeine, a painkiller available over the counter in the UK, in their bloodstream, which the UAE’s law counts as “possession”; the same applies to a number of cold and flu remedies. They note that the country’s customs authorities use highly sensitive equipment which can detect even minute quantities of banned substances.
Western liberals are quick to condemn the “excesses” of the Shari’a (not that this is Shari’a) in physically punishing adulterers and the like; however, third-world rulers, including Arabs, seem eager to impress western governments (further down the drug supply chain from themselves) that they can be tougher on drug traffickers than those who have to deal with niceties like due judicial process, or a parliament which insists on debating any proposed law, particularly one as idiotic and brutal as this one. They give the impression of playground hoodlums who relieve the teachers of the burden of doing their jobs and keeping “discipline” by doing what the teachers can’t do in much of the western world nowadays: physically kicking people into line.
Another impression is of a silly little boy with a country, and a bunch of shiny new equipment, for playthings, using them to play games with innocent people’s lives. There are various stories of Muslim rulers who sent troops into non-Muslim countries to rescue people, particularly women, who were in danger; for all the praises which are sung of how beneficient the Emirates’ rulers are (to their native subjects and wealthy western ex-pats, not so much to the Pakistani migrant labourers who build their vanity towers), they are menacing travellers by throwing people in jail for no reason. This is nothing other than banditry (the Reliance of the Traveller lists a number of other, considerably milder, modern examples), and as unlikely as it is and much as I would hate to see a Muslim country attacked, the only people to blame if some troops are redeployed from Iraq to kick a few of their toys over and rescue their victims are the “beneficent” ruling clan themselves.
