Saudi Arabia: 20,000 killed in vanity construction project

Recent reports into NEOM – an impossibly ambitious series of megaprojects being constructed by the Saudi Arabian monarchy in the desert – have revealed the slave-like conditions of the workers, which have already led to 20,000 deaths.

NEOM – “the city of the future”, a “new world wonder”, and a “revolution in urban living”, according to its website – is a collection of sci-fi megaprojects dreamt up by absolutist Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) and his well-paid contractors. They are currently under construction in a largely barren desert region of Saudi Arabia, the driest and hottest part of the whole country.

Among its plans are: the only ski resort in the Middle East; an island retreat with glow-in-the-dark, marble beaches; a floating, octagonal industrial complex; and an upside-down underwater skyscraper that can only be accessed by submarine. In other words, a playground for the rich.

The centrepiece of NEOM is ‘the Line’, a planned megacity that will apparently house nine million people, made up of two 106 mile long, skyscraper-tall buildings. Once finished, the city will allegedly produce zero emissions and run entirely on renewable energy. It also promises to include an artificial moon, robotic butlers, an indoor climate, flying taxis, and an animatronic Jurassic Park.

NEOM is part of the ambitious ‘Vision 2030’ project of MBS, which aims to diversify Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy, which currently accounts for 40 percent of GDP. Through NEOM in particular, MBS dreams of transforming the country into a powerhouse of industry, trade and science, as well as a magnet for tourists and western businessmen.

Located at the northernmost part of the Red Sea, adjacent to the Sinai Peninsula and a short distance from Israel, it is also part of Saudi Arabia’s attempt to draw closer to the other US-backed regimes in the region. The Saudi monarchy has promised hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into Egypt as part of the project, and aims to directly connect NEOM with the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh. In Israel, the preposterous plan called ‘Gaza 2035’ allegedly leaked from Netanyahu’s cabinet, as reported in The Jerusalem Post, also supposedly intends to build a “massive free trade zone” in an ethnically cleansed Gaza with a rail link to NEOM.

NEOM is currently being built by a workforce of 140,000, at an estimated cost of $2 trillion. It is already the largest construction project taking place anywhere in the world, and will use 20 percent of all steel produced worldwide, according to one official.

Utopian dream and capitalist nightmare

NEOM is presented as a utopia. However, beneath the glittery surface lies a grim reality of capitalist hyper-exploitation. The project is being constructed with a gigantic reserve of migrant workers, toiling in slave-like conditions.

These desperate workers are lured from countries like Nepal, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to work on the Saudi megaprojects with the promise of higher wages. When they arrive, they are effectively imprisoned under the Kafala system. This legally binds the workers to their employers; to change or quit jobs, they have to receive permission from the company, giving these cut-throat bosses total control over the employment and immigration status of the workers.

In fact, in order to be ‘recruited’ in the first place, they often have to pay huge fees, preventing them from leaving until they have paid off their debt. There have been many reports of workers having their passports taken, leaving them at the complete mercy of these brutal capitalists.

With no means of protesting their inhuman working conditions, these workers form a limitless, disposable pool of hyper-exploitable labour with which the Saudi princes can build their skyscrapers in the sand. This horror is far from unique to NEOM: 76 percent of the Saudi private sector workforce is made up of migrant labour, most of whom are victims of this system.

Former workers report systematic forced labour, and describe that they were made to feel like “trapped slaves” and “beggars”. As the multi-millionaire former CEO of NEOM candidly put it: “I drive everybody like a slave… When they drop down dead, I celebrate. That’s how I do my projects.”

Wayne Borg, former head of NEOM’s media division, was caught expressing racist contempt for the lives of South Asian migrant workers at NEOM, when he described them as “fucking morons”, adding that “white people are at the top of the pecking order”.

As a result of the gruelling forced labour, 21,000 migrant workers have been killed since construction began in 2021 and a further 100,000 have gone missing.

Many of these deaths remain unexplained. In the recent ITV documentary, Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia, a Nepalese worker, Raju Bishwakarmal, who was working on a Saudi megaproject, contacted friends and family to ask for help, saying his employer would only let him leave if he paid them five months salary. He was found dead soon after.

Nor are the workers’ lives the only ones that have been sacrificed for the project. In order to make room for the Line, the Saudi regime has forcibly expelled the 20,000 Howeitat tribespeople who have been living on the land for hundreds of years. During this process, state security forces murdered at least five tribespeople and arrested 50 more, all for refusing to vacate their homes to make way for the construction.

The prince’s pipedreams

Yet, in spite of the tens of thousands of lives and the hundreds of billions of dollars that the project has already cost, NEOM is nothing more than a prince’s pipedream.

At best, the project would be a dystopia. Realistically, it is completely impossible / Image: fair use

The Saudi state has paid foreign contractors millions of dollars to come up with exciting but totally unrealistic plans, which then are signed off by a prince who no one dares contradict for fear of losing their head. As a result, the project has produced tonnes of flashy adverts and AI visualisations of cities which are, in reality, totally impossible to build.

Unsurprisingly, the project has been plagued by delays and inflated costs. At first, the project was projected to cost $500 billion, but this has spiralled to at least $1.5 trillion, which is substantially more than Saudi Arabia’s annual GDP. The Prince initially boasted of building the huge 106 mile city by 2030, but it is now looking like only 1.5 miles – less than 2 percent of the total – will be completed by then.

While the venture was intended to attract investment from international capitalists, few have been stupid enough to get involved. As a result, all of this is primarily being funded by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, controlled by MBS himself.

At best, the project would be a dystopia. Realistically, it is completely impossible. It will remain little more than a hole in the desert in which billions more Saudi dollars and thousands more migrant workers will be buried.

What is all this for? Death, destruction, and misery just to create a playground for a callous, unaccountable monarch and his rich friends!

Poverty amidst plenty

NEOM perfectly encapsulates the insanity of capitalism today: the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small group of billionaires looking for ways to flaunt and squander their millions while presiding over war and destitution.

Saudi Arabia is a country with a huge abundance of wealth. But so long as this is appropriated by a tiny capitalist minority, billions will be wasted on the pipedreams of the megarich / Image: public domain

In Saudi Arabia, this inequality takes on a particularly extreme form. An estimated 20 percent of people are living in poverty, and millions of migrant workers toil in slave-like conditions. At the other pole, the oil reserves and large parts of the banking, telecommunications and real estate sectors are owned and controlled by one family with a net worth of $1.4 trillion.

Saudi Arabia is a country with a huge abundance of wealth. But so long as this is appropriated by a tiny capitalist minority, instead of the millions of workers that create it, billions will be wasted on the pipedreams of the megarich instead of going to solve the pressing needs of the exploited majority.

We are fighting for a society where this wealth, which has been produced from the blood and sweat of the working class, is used rationally for the benefit of everyone. This would mean that, instead of playgrounds for the rich, we could have genuinely affordable housing and infrastructure for all. This is only possible, however, in a society where the workers are in power rather than pampered princes and their friends.

It is very apt that the NEOM projects are being built on the sand; with economic, social and political crises raging all around, these are not solid foundations. In spite of their hubristic, ludicrously expensive vanity projects – and in some measure, because of them – the Saudi royal family are preparing a revolutionary reckoning for their imperialist butchery and criminal exploitation of millions.

Once that day comes and these monsters are swept away, the NEOM projects will remain as strange monuments to a brutal system.