"The 15 officers who arrived at the prison in southern Yemen hid their faces behind head dresses, but their accents were clearly foreign. They lined up the detainees and ordered them to undress and lie down. The officers then searched the anal cavity of each prisoner, claiming that they were looking for contraband mobile phones. The men screamed and wept. Those who resisted were threatened by barking dogs and beaten until they bled." - Al Jazeera, Yemeni prisoners say UAE officers sexually torture them: AP, 20th of July 2018
The United Arab Emirates is, as the saying goes, a small country with big ideas.
A regime accused by the UN of slaughtering thousands of civilians in airstrikes over Yemen, alleged by Qatar to be running a network of clandestine prisons for sexual and psychological torture, and under investigation by British police for arbitrary detention and torture of British nationals.
Secret foreign prisons where reports have found that "individuals endured rape at the hands of coalition forces and were subjected to electrocution in the genitals, chest and armpits" and "electric cables were used alongside wooden bats and steel poles during the interrogation sessions".
A justice system described by human rights lawyers as "a system which is abused by individuals in positions of power and a complete vacuum of accountability".
Systematic abuse of Asian domestic workers within a system repeatedly called "21st century slavery" or a "culture of slavery".
And, according to our esteemed External Relations minister, a government that are our new best mates!
Last week, our man in the Middle East, or indeed whichever other violently nasty dictatorship you require a friendly relationship with, returned from a trip to the fakest land on Earth, the UAE. I'm sure the independentista crowd were delighted to hear that from now on, Jersey is a big boy now and so we can be trusted to negotiate our own trade deals, independent of UK government say-so.
Who are our brand, shiny new first partners in international commerce? Why, a murderous absolute monarchy which executes queer people and backs al-Qaeda, of course!
I think it's safe to say that we've reached the point in the life of a tax haven where any sense of maintaining some sort of reasonable international reputation has gone completely out the window at this point.
Real talk here for a second.
Diplomacy is tough stuff, and it often involves sitting down and talking with people you neither agree with nor particularly like. Many regimes in the world may not share your values, and practically none share mine, but sitting down with people you don't share values with is part of building a more peaceful world. However, if it wasn't clear from the above, the UAE is not just your bog-standard authoritarian regime. They are a rabidly violent and extremely nasty supporter of international terrorism, an accomplice of Saudi Arabia in the mass murder of Yemenis - using British weapons - and an economy largely based on the effective slavery of millions of south Asian migrant workers, to the point where Emiratis are a small minority within their own country. They've faced serial condemnation from news outlets, international organisations and the UN for their conduct both at home and abroad, and have been involved in some of the worst torture operations since "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation techniques".
Basically, these are some really nasty people.
It gets worse.
According to today's rag, it's been confirmed that our second trade deal as an independent negotiator will be with those paragons of virtue, the government of Rwanda. I've discussed Rwanda before on this blog, back when the Jersey Overseas Aid Commission - was getting all in a tizz during the row over Arsenal's links to the Rwandan government. You can read the original blog, "Jersey's support for the racist Rwandan dictatorship" - but by way of summary, Rwanda is a totalitarian ethnostate run on pre-1959, colonial lines, with members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group - including Paul Kagame and his former terrorist band turned governing party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front - filling up virtually all governmental positions and members of the majority Hutu ethnic group reduced to their former status as second-class citizens. It's also, surprise surprise, known for having a serious torture problem - Human Rights Watch, interviewing an ex-prisoner from Rwanda known as Ernest (not his real name) wrote "Ernest said that when he refused to confess, soldiers “brought a plastic bag and put it over my head and started to ask questions. After a few minutes, when they saw that I was suffocating, they stopped.” He said they suffocated him four more times until he defecated on himself. “I thought I was going to die,” Ernest told us."
Our wonderful new partners, everyone. Isn't globalisation great?
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