The United Arab Emirates Is Creating This Century’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
During the late nineteenth century, under the aegis of a colonial order supervised by the French and British and German Empires, the constitutional monarch of Belgium, a tiny country in Europe, created an imitation empire that became the world’s evilest regime.
In 1876, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, a grandson of the last King of France and a cousin of both Queen Victoria and the German-born Prince Albert, founded the International African Association for humanitarian improvement of the “dark continent.” Three years later, in 1879, the Association sponsored Henry Stanley, who had explored central Africa in the 1870s, to secure land there for Leopold. In 1885, at the Berlin Conference that divided Africa among the empires governed by Leopold’s relatives, Leopold began governing the Congo Free State as his own private kingdom until 1908: an extension of colonial mechanisms of control that was even less regulated than colonial operations on behalf of actual governments. What came next was the deaths of millions of people so that Leopold’s agents or those native inhabitants these agents paid could extract ivory to service high-end collectors and rubber to equip bicycles and automobiles and make Leopold a fortune.
The Cambridge World History of Genocide—which acknowledges that “summarizing the impact of the Congo Free State is not a straightforward task” since “estimating the death toll is fraught with controversy” especially given contested current scholarship and the fact that “describing the effects on survivors…is necessarily impressionistic”—nonetheless describes Leopold’s rule as amounting to “a cataclysmic event with a 23-year trajectory extending across hundreds of thousands of square miles and affecting millions of people.” Over these twenty-three years:
“People were deliberately killed in war and in systematically violent exploitation. They died of wounds inflicted through fighting, punishment or torture. Villagers sent in search of rubber, fleeing from the demands of the state, or homeless because of reprisals died from accidents, attacks by wild beasts, exposure and starvation. The colonial transport system spread fatal diseases, particularly smallpox and sleeping sickness, accelerating a process already put in motion by Swahili-Arab slavers. The malnourishment that attended the Free State’s exactions increased mortality by reducing resistance. In some places, sleeping sickness took 80 per cent of the population. Sexually transmitted diseases both took lives and reduced fertility. Fertility also fell due to malnourishment, family disruption and women’s decisions to prevent pregnancy so that flight would be easier if necessary…The number who died because of official action could have ranged from some hundreds of thousands to close to 2 million.”
These effects had wider and longer consequences, making the Congolese population vulnerable to other influences so that, until roughly 1925, “deaths from privation or disease…could have ranged anywhere between 3 million and 8 million, including the impact of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic”; estimates which “imply a total of between 3.4 and 10 million lives lost.”
At the same time, Leopold brought colonization home, remaking Belgian cities like Brussels off the example of Napoleon III’s Paris, a project that displaced its own citizens in the name of “tourism” and “glory.” As in the Congo, Leopold, off his “competitiveness and desire for prestige” and his determination “to recreate Parisian style boulevards,” put the urban renewal process in Belgium on accelerant. His “haste and ambition converted into a reckless approach to urban planning” and “drove Brussels into a blind spot” of “large scale demolition” where residents were “victimized by the relentless drift of the authorities to modernize.” In the end, “boulevards were seen as alienating…and interest [in]…apartment buildings remained low”; “the urban plan…was unpopular among residents”; and the construction process led to the “mass eviction of inhabitants.” Destruction also continued as Leopold erected more buildings off his profits from the Congo.
For a period, Leopold’s activities abroad were masked by propaganda off the model of Henry Stanley’s early-1870s trek through Africa, shorthanded in popular history as an exercise in humanitarian adventurist bonhomie (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”). But by 1908, books on what was in fact happening in the Congo by Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness) and Arthur Conan Doyle had created an outcry that forced Leopold, a year from death, to cede his possession to the Belgian Parliament, formalizing colonial rule with some semblance of the humanitarianism initially promised by Leopold. And yet this was not the end of the empire. In 1906, knowing his possession of the Congo was running short, Leopold had partnered with an associate of the Rockefellers on the logic that “American dollars are not imperialistic” to begin extracting the Congo’s other precious resource, diamonds. The partnership created the foundations for extractions like the “blood diamond” trade that continue today. Leopold’s predations at home also continued after his death: his “modernizing” demolitions of Belgian cities set the terms for two future “modernization” projects widely agreed to be disastrous failures which left Brussels a “fragmented” and “traumatizing” symbol of “a volatile society.”
Overall, the reign of King Leopold II would seem to be the ultimate cautionary tale, the opposite of what any citizen anywhere would want put on repeat. This is a perception reinforced by a stream of books, museum exhibitions, proclamations and mea culpas on the subject of the Belgian Congo which assure everyone that what happened a century ago “under western eyes” will never happen again. And yet, for all of that, what happened then is happening again. It is happening under western eyes and with western help and after western disavowals. And it is happening with a humanitarian justification and under an aesthetic of bonhomie and with reverberations “back home.” It’s only the players who differ, and their scope.
America has assumed the role of European empires. A tiny sliver of a country, the United Arab Emirates, which was formed from the federation of seven Gulf principalities or emirates in 1971 under the leadership of the Sheik of the largest emirate, Abu Dhabi, and whose landmass is smaller than the state of Indiana’s, has assumed the role of tiny Belgium. A similarly grasping, imitative monarch as Leopold with similarly deep imperial connections, Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has taken Leopold’s role. And the damage of Mohammed’s actions not only accrues in the Congo and “at home” in the UAE but across Africa with America’s backing.
This modern-day saga of imitative empire begins, in the telling of the scholar Elham Fakhro in a recent book covering the subject, in the early 2000s, when Mohammed’s father Sheik Zayed, Abu Dhabi’s leader and the founder of the UAE, died. Mohammed, thanks to his older brother’s declining health, quickly became de facto leader or president of the UAE until succeeding formally in 2022. Zayed, the father, had been known for his low-key, pro-Arab and pro-Muslim rule, and for keeping nominal distance from America and America’s proxy Israel. But in fact Zayed was, from the beginning, a western proxy; “installed” by the British to rule Abu Dhabi in 1966 “at the request of leading Abu Dhabi families…because they were fed up with his brother…who had been…averse to development.” In the years after his de-facto accession, Mohammed has shed even his father’s nominal concerns with religion and sovereignty and, in the name of development, drew close to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and American empire; the equivalents of Britain, Germany, and France in Leopold’s day.
According to Fakhro, Mohammed’s early actions in this direction were “strengthening the UAE’s military and its technological capabilities”; creating what American commanders saw as the region’s most effective air force; and offering support for America during its invasion of Iraq. He also inked security and technology agreements with Israel; and with Saudi Arabia after the accession to power there of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, twenty years younger than Mohammed but with a similar modernizing bent. It was from this feathered nest of imperial entanglements, more substantive in every way than Leopold’s family ties to Britain and Germany and France, that Mohammed moved into Africa with a similar purpose as Leopold’s: resource extraction. The actuality of this extraction was as dramatic as Leopold’s but much more broadly flung. Indeed, in 2024, after twenty years of concentrated investment, the UAE became the largest backer of new business projects in Africa, with its commitments “more than double the value of those made by companies from the UK, France or China.”
What, precisely, does this investment look like? Where Leopold’s aim for Congo had been enriching his small and resource-poor kingdom using ivory and rubber, Mohammed’s was enriching his small oil-rich kingdom with land, agricultural produce, and mineral wealth. To this end Mohammed has steadily colonized substantial portions of multiple African countries, affecting over 900 million human beings. In four countries, including Liberia and Zimbabwe, he has purchased 10-20% of each country’s landmass for “carbon exchange”; a scheme where companies buy land in the name of environmental preservation, then sell “carbon credits” to companies which generate carbon dioxide. In ten countries, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Morocco, he has accelerated direct and indirect purchases of agricultural land. In at least seven countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Sudan, he has invested in extractions of diamonds, cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, nickel, and gold—creating a web of smuggling and exportation-on-the-cheap. And underpinning all of this is naval and military strength: ports in twelve African countries, including Egypt, and military agreements for training and weapons with five, including Somalia.
One byproduct of infringements which span so many countries and operate via so many different economic spheres is that their impacts can’t be measured as directly as Leopold’s—and yet, despite this, some fairly direct impacts of Mohammed’s activities can be described. His land buys are linked to “the forced eviction of local populations” in Liberia and Kenya. His buyout of agriculture across countries has concentrated production, displaced small farmers, limited available water, and incentivized armed takeovers of agricultural land. His forced shift away from farming produce and toward farming livestock feed has denuded the soil and made actual food scarce. His inducements for diamonds mean that, since 2015, “the UAE’s rough diamond trade has grown by over 75%,” unseating Belgium to become the world’s top trading hub with at least $1.6 billion of it under the table: “a major deprivation for African treasuries” which need the revenue. His inducements for gold have led experts to estimate that at least 95% of gold exports from Central and East Africa pass through Dubai, often under the table. (In 2015, for example, exports were reported by the UAE of “$7.4 billion from 25 African countries,” nineteen of which “had not declared any exports to the UAE.”) And this illicit smuggling, like agricultural concentration, fuels profiteering militias.
On the occasions when Mohammed’s expanding empire has been threatened by Muslim-led popular movements for sovereignty—in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia—he has successfully supported proxy wars or coups to stop them. In other places, Mohammed has supported order, at least for a time, for his own purposes. One example is Somalia, which the UAE helped fight piracy by providing funding for forces led by the Iraq War “veteran” mercenary Erik Prince. The UAE also invested in Somalia’s sea trade by pouring $440 million into Berbera Port and receiving a thirty-year concession to manage it, and refurbishing Bosaso Port to “catalyz[e] economic growth” in a region where unemployment is estimated to affect up to 75% of the population. And yet Mohammed can also abandon his commitment to order as swiftly as he makes it. Only this year, the UAE’s iconoclastic stealth encouragement of the international recognition of Somaliland—“a self-declared independent” or breakaway region of Somalia which is also the location of the same Berbera Port that the UAE has claim to for thirty years—led Somalia’s government to sever all ties with the UAE for “practices…that undermine…sovereignty.”
But the hearts of the UAE’s particular darkness are the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, countries where Mohammed’s desire for agricultural land converge with his desire for minerals. The UAE is “by far the largest importer of conflict gold from both Sudan and Congo.” It is also a recent major investor in Congolese mining while, in Sudan, it “has pumped over US$6 billion into…foreign reserves [and] agricultural expansion projects” totaling approximately 525,000 acres. And so it is perhaps not surprising that the Rwandan government, which counts the UAE as its largest trading partner and backer, has been “arming and training the M23 militia accused of indiscriminate killing, rape and mass displacement in the…Congo” to extract minerals on the cheap via firms or intermediaries tied to the UAE. Nor is it surprising that, in response to increasing Muslim power in the Sudanese government, the UAE has made a proxy of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), run by a tycoon worth $7 billion off of deep ties to the gold trade via the UAE. The UAE has financed and armed the RSF, sometimes with weapons transferred from the UAE’s proxies in Libya, to engage in “mass executions and killings” and “sexual violence and torture”; what amounts to “[genocide]-level mass extermination.” As a result of these conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and more than twenty million people have been displaced while fifty-eight million face “acute food insecurity” and starvation.
These are, in other words, extraction genocides, much as Leopold’s project in the Congo was an extraction genocide. They are rapes-for-profit by slivers of states with small populations (Rwanda is the size of Maryland and has more than fourteen million people) against countries with vast territory (the Democratic Republic of the Congo is about the size of the United States East of the Mississippi; Sudan is a quarter of the size of the United States) together populated by about 165 million people. And, much as Leopold’s genocide in the Congo provided him with the fortune for demolition projects on his own cities at home, so Mohammed’s genocides in Central Africa are providing him the food base and the precious mineral resources to accelerate colonizing projects in the United Arab Emirates.
Environmental technology, artificial intelligence, and urban developments—these are the new coins of Mohammed’s Emirati realm. First are solar projects: Noor Abu Dhabi park in Abu Dhabi, which Emiratis call the “world’s largest single-site solar power plant”; and the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park in Dubai, a “science fiction-like array of solar panels…covering an area larger than Manhattan.” Next are investments in AI, to the tune of $600 billion since 2025, “to diversify [the] economy” from oil “and become the world’s next technological hub.” And, finally, the ultimate instantiations of these green and AI expansions are “smart cities”: blending “environmental friendly” space-saving techniques with foreign investment and AI-based services. The model city in this vein is Dubai, already “the Gulf’s reigning logistics and financial hub” now being developed based on the Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan. The Plan “outlines a transition [for the city] from around 3.3 million residents [in 2020] to a daytime population of 7.8 million by 2040.” Its methods include “strategies that extract more value from existing properties” by “increasing building heights, introducing mixed-use towers, and regenerating older districts” while anchoring growth “in trade, finance, tourism, and digital sectors” to generate nearly $9 trillion “in economic output over 10 years.”
To finish this report, go to The Libertarian Institute.
Photo Credit: Kalashae, Wikimedia Commons.