Yearbook 2009
United Arab Emirates. According to countryaah, the Dubai debt crisis became acute at the end of November when the Emirate government announced that it wanted to renegotiate the loans the state-owned company Dubai World had taken to primarily finance luxury projects in the real estate industry. This involved most of Dubai’s total debt burden of USD 80 billion. The crisis caused stock markets around the world to collapse as lenders saw their investments threatened, but the most vulnerable were hundreds of thousands of guest workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh who in many cases lost their jobs and were forced to travel home heavily indebted. See ABBREVIATIONFINDER for abbreviation AE which stands for the nation of United Arab Emirates.
The United Arab Emirates central bank had decided in February to lend US $ 10 billion to Dubai to help the emirate cope with the escalating debt crisis, but that had not helped. In December, the emirate Abu Dhabi lent as much. The United States was reported to have agreed on May 22 to supply fuel and equipment worth US $ 41 billion to the United Arab Emirates nuclear energy industry. The country was reported in May to have withdrawn from plans to join the currency union that the Gulf States Cooperation Council (GCC) planned. The background was assumed to be dissatisfaction with the organization’s plans to place the Union central bank in Saudi Arabia.
Following an agreement between the country’s government and the UN Children’s Fund UNICEF, the government began to pay damages to about 900 former camel jockeys during the summer. Many of the boys had been kept isolated on camel farms, where they were put on starvation diets to become as light as possible and forced to ride despite risking breaking arms or legs. Since 2002, it has been prohibited to use children under the age of 15 as camel jockeys.
The Arabian Peninsula’s first metro line opened in September in the city of Dubai. The trains, which were driverless, went under ground in the city center and above ground outside the city.
Ambivalent relations between UAE and Iran
Relations between the Arab countries of the Arabian / Persian Gulf and the Islamic Republic of Iran are generally strained due to political, religious and strategic divergences that have their roots since the 1979 Iranian revolution. cold has been a constant in the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the same cannot be said of the relations between Tehran and Abu Dhabi. Although bilateral relations have been marked in the past by strong political tension, especially regarding the disputed islands in the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranian nuclear program, progress on the latter point could contribute to the revival of trade and investment relations with Tehran.. Already immediately after the historic interim agreementon Iranian nuclear power, of November 2013, the two countries had embarked on the path of détente in an attempt to open a new diplomatic course. An attempt that met with some success with the visit in December 2013 to the UAE by Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. During the meeting, Zarif and his Emirati counterpart, Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, made a double proposal aimed at resolving disputes regarding territorial disputes and improving political-commercial relations between the two countries. The UAE, in fact, are among the major exporters to Iran, so much so that they account for 10% of total Iranian imports. At the same time, Tehran has strong economic and financial interests in the UAE. The federation also has a role in re-imports to Iran from third countries, otherwise hampered by international sanctions. The emirate most affected by relations with Iran is Dubai, where about 400,000 Iranians reside and is a traditionalcommercial hub for the Islamic Republic. In addition to being criticized by the major Arab players in the Gulf and by the US, the economic relations between Dubai and Iran also create differences within the UAE with the other most important emirate, that of Abu Dhabi.