Stop eating Dubai chocolate. Stop buying it. Stop selling it. Stop talking about it.
Dubai is making a bid for cultural soft power to distract us from rampant slavery in the UAE and their fleecing of Sudan.
Let’s start with a quick history of the confection.
Back in 2021, a pregnant British-Egyptian expat named Sarah Hamouda was living in Dubai. Inspired by her cravings, she combined chocolate, pistachio, tahini, and knafeh into something that didn’t suck. She workshopped the idea, eventually collaborating with Filipino chef Nouel Catis Omamalin to develop the candy made famous by influencers a few years later.
In an aggressive campaign of gastrodiplomacy, the UAE seized on the virality of the candy which quickly came to be known as Dubai chocolate. Facing scrutiny for their growing image of debauchery and vapid opulence, Dubai saw an opportunity to recalibrate impressions. But this is much more than tourism board PR.
This is a smokescreen for some of the ugliest neocolonialist shenanigans we’ve ever seen.
Slavery
While the UAE has publicized recent reforms to their migrant labor policies, old habits die hard. The on-the-ground realities for primarily South Asian workers is a far cry from codified legislation. It is illegal on paper to withhold wages and passports, but the practices are still commonplace with little advocacy or enforcement. This is attributable to the kafala system prevalent throughout much of the Arab world.
The kafala system is a migrant labor policy that binds foreign workers to their employer. Employers have near total control over what the employment arrangement looks like. With little state-level oversight, it’s a recipe for abuse.
The UAE only revised domestic worker contracts in 2014 to mandate one rest day per week. Despite this, employers commonly refuse days off. Furthermore, overtime pay regulations exclude domestic helpers from protections that apply to other sectors. They do not guarantee people the right to freedom of communication (access to a mobile phone or internet) nor a standard minimum wage.
With no guarantee of wages, no time off, and no opportunities to communicate with others, migrant workers are completely at the mercy of their employer. Several humanitarian NGOs estimate that the UAE has trapped well over 100,000 people in some form of functional slavery.
Dubai builds their massive construction projects on slave labor. They recruit workers from South and Central Asia, China, and the Philippines. Recruiters charge a fee that often requires the liquidation of personal land or other assets. They tell workers that these costs are to offset travel and visa expenses, fees they might recover in 1-2 years.
They come to the UAE effectively as indentured servants. Employers force them to work in the brutality of the Gulf heat, confiscate passports, withhold wages, deny time off, and limit any outside communication. All of this is illegal on paper, but under bureaucratic cover these abuses persist unabated.
We know people love their Dubai chocolate. We understand that a hundred-thousand poor people slaving away in the desert heat won’t keep morons glued to their IG feeds from salivating at what looks like a Kit-Kat stuffed with chicken shit.
So let’s talk about Sudan.
Sudan
There are a lot of things that are complicated about the ongoing conflict in Sudan, but the UAE’s neocolonial project there is pretty straightforward.
The UAE is recognized as the biggest gold dealer in the world. The UAE doesn’t have any gold mines. Everything it has, it gets from somewhere else.
Sudan is one of those places.
The value of gold is at an all-time high. As global energy needs diversify, petroleum and the currency it’s pegged to (American dollars) are losing value. Paper money is increasingly volatile and the world is looking to stabilize its wealth. Gold has always done this very well.
Sudan has gold, but never fully developed the infrastructure to support its extraction and sale. In response to increasing demand, the Sudanese transitional government gave private landowners permission to mine and sell their gold. That creates a certain security risk for those with gold on their property. Militias formed to protect these valuable assets.
Enter the UAE.
They created a marketplace where private parties can sell their gold. Importantly, the UAE is fine doing business without any government oversight. This is all well and good for the individual Sudanese landowners and the militias that protect them, but the government of Sudan and the bulk of the population is being fleeced as tons and tons of gold is smuggled out of the country.
But not only does the UAE enrich these private landowners and paramilitary groups through the purchase of smuggled gold, they also provide weapons. The UAE and Russia are funding a proxy war, putting all of their money on the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa. Their aim is to topple any remnants of the Sudanese government which might impede the extraction of gold and livestock.
The UAE is a desert with lousy food security largely dependent on imports, technology, and hydroponics. In addition to gold, they are fomenting death and destruction in order to siphon the agricultural wealth of Sudan. All while idiots munch mindlessly on Dubai chocolate.
Don’t do that.
Influencers
Taking Dubai chocolate back to its innocent origins as the fever-dream of a pregnant ex-pat, we need to emphasize that the only reason any of us know about it is because someone else with filters, good lighting, and pancake makeup played up the ooey-gooeyness of the abomination on social media.
It’s been nearly four years since we locked ourselves out of that cesspool. Social media is a net negative for society that has turned every participant’s interaction with it into a data point for corporations and nation-states to exploit. The best thing you can do right now for your mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional health is to delete all of your social media accounts today.
Most of you reading this won’t, of course. And the UAE knows that.
That’s why they’re launching Beautiful Destinations, their influencer academy. They’re going to pay people to live and document their time in the UAE, curating every image and caption for maximum engagement.
A promotional video by Beautiful Destinations describes the program as “an elite training environment where we invest in you to support Dubai’s unparalleled vision for the future of tourism.” Successful applicants will typically train five days a week, with modules covering photography and cinematography, editing and color grading, sound effects, AI tools, industry regulations, and professional development as a travel content creator.
Beautiful Destinations
It’s an elite training psyop meant to obscure the horrendous policies of these neocolonist slaver turncoats. The UAE is the leading Arab trade partner of Israel, and has been the duration of the Gazan genocide. While the rest of the world demonstrated and divested, the UAE doubled-down on its partnership with the most vile regime the modern world has witnessed since the Second World War.
Think about that. The UAE is actually bankrolling two genocides: Sudan and Gaza.
Dubai chocolate is the devil’s candy. Dubai chocolate is for soulless drones.
Leave it alone.
Stick to knafeh, the revolutionary’s dessert of choice.
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