The first President of the UAE, Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan, remained in power from independence in 1971 till his death more than a year ago. He was succeeded by his son Shiekh Khalifa in Zayed as the Emir of Abu Dhabi. Following the tradition, the seven-member Supreme Council of the UAE, which consists of all the seven rulers, elected him as the second President of the UAE. Last month, Dubai’s Shiekh Maktoum bin Rashed has also died and has been succeeded by his brother Shiekh Mohammad bin Rashid, the architect of modern Dubai. The Supreme Council has confirmed him to be the Prime Minister of the UAE. Thus, transition to the new generation is complete. True, Dubai had to look far beyond oil since it had, unlike, Abu Dhabi, very little of it. Indeed. It is just ten years when oil will become history in Dubai. But to look beyond one’s nose is something that needs vision, for which Arab Sheikhs were never distinguished for. Dubai’s ruling Maktoum dynasty was an exception, and so was that of Sharjah to a limited extent. Dubai is by no means the only example of successful planning under an authoritarian structure--- with no parliament to represent public interests and no free media to air public views--- but it is definitely one of the most striking stories of success, materially speaking; since the social and distributive aspects of the growth leave much to be desired. Dubai is rising as an oasis in the desert of the Middle East, both in the literal and the economic sense. It is trying to become the world’s leading free port, business and tourism hub, and a Mecca for international transport activity. From its annual shopping fairs to the sports championships to holding international conferences, Dubai is becoming a household name, far and wide.

The commercial Dubai Tower (Burj Dubai) once completed to its less than one kilometre height, would be the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s theme park would be double the size of Disney world, and its 500-bed underwater hotel the only one of its kind on this planet. The national airlines of the UAE, called “Emirates”, after managing takeovers of other airlines like Air Lanka, is vying to become the leading air carrier. Add to it, two more grandiose projects; the Jebel Ali Airport ultimately to be equipped with six runways and a capacity to handle 120 million passengers annually, and the $15 billion aircraft manufacturing project, the Islamic Aviation Services, that is being established next to it. Putting the three together will mean that Dubai looks to dominate the skies, as early as by 2020. Dubai is also investing massively in its own port to make it world’s leading container terminal. This somehow brings it into conflict with the commercial interests of Iran and Pakistan. For the past few years, the latter is working rapidly on the Deep Sea Port at a place called Gawadar with Chinese help. There was a spate of terrorist attacks against the project including ones targeting and killing Chinese engineers working on the Gawadar port site. Fingers have been raised at some Dubai businessmen suspected to be behind the financing of the attacks whose responsibility a secessionist movement, calling itself Balochistan Liberation Army, has claimed. The UAE is a strange place; it has a native population, all seven states combined, of just 300,000 and a so-called temporary immigrant population four times that much. Ostensibly, the 80% immigrants, mostly of Indian and Pakistani origin, are to leave some day, but the truth is that most of the second and third generation immigrants have no roots back in South Asia. And unless a violent massacre takes place of the people of South Asians origin, as notorious despot Idi Amin had done with them in Uganda in 1979-80, the non-Arab majority is there to stay. In order to retain their iron grip on national governance and resources, the Arabs have not only postponed democratic reforms in the Union but have made laws that are so blatantly discriminatory against residents of Asian origin, that the discriminatory rules against the Blacks under Apartheid in the formerly White-dominated South Africa would appear fairly humane.

Reforms, the Arabs know, can no longer be avoided. The first step is the announcement that I future half the seats in the forty-member consultative Assembly, called the Federal National Council, whose members are nominated after consultation between the seven rulers, will be elected. The catch, however, is that the electoral college for those 20 seats is to consist of 2000 voters, all of whom will be nominated by the ruling family. There is no question that any of the nominated voters would be from the non-Arab majority. The revolutions and civil wars of the past century have shown that economic progress alone is not a sufficient condition to ensure stability unless political progress is made towards sharing the fruit among all, or most, sections of the society across the racial and linguistic fault lines. The sooner the ruling dynasties in the UAE understand it, the better. The writer is the Middle East Editor of Cambridge Review of International Affairs and a widely read analyst on politics, governance and human rights in the Muslim world.