Mr bin Laden, his sons, and their front man, Muhammad Ahmed al-Ahmed, a
Saudi former shipping executive, say they have already invested "hundreds of
millions of dollars" in a plan to build cities on either side of the Bab
al-Mandib (Gate of Tears) strait at the foot of the Red Sea. Construction is
supposed to begin next year, after the terms of sovereignty for the tax-free
metropolises have been agreed. By 2025, says Mr Ahmed, Djibouti's Noor City
will have 2.5m people and its Yemeni twin 4.5m. Several million jobs will be
created. An airport serving both cities will, he says, attract 100m
passengers a year. A 29km bridge across the strait will connect Arabia and
Africa by road, rail and pipelines, its towers among the tallest on earth.
The cost? A mere $200 billion or so.
Yet oddly, aside from Djibouti's, no African government officials were to be
seen, no architect, no technical adviser to explain how the cities could run
on renewable energy, and barely an engineer. None of the Noor City
delegation noted that blazing hot Djibouti, with 800,000 people, is already
acutely short of water and imports nearly all its food, that 150,000 of its
people are "facing imminent starvation", according to the UN's World Food
Programme, and that millions more are famished in next-door Ethiopia. Mr
Ahmed also brushed aside any worry about instability in Yemen, where an
al-Qaeda suicide bombing on July 26th targeted the country's police. Yet at
the last moment Yemen's government refused visas to journalists travelling
with Mr bin Laden.
Mr Ahmed has worked for DynCorp, an American military contractor. So had one
of the project's main managers, Michel Vachon, before moving to L3
Communications, a contractor often employed by the American government.
Another manager, Dean Kershaw, spent 29 years in America's forces; some
others had served in the Bush administration. Armed American special-forces
veterans now apparently employed as security guards by L3 chaperoned
journalists. All part of an American plan to help secure the Suez shipping
lane or to strengthen the hand of friendly forces in Yemen? "Absolutely
not," said Mr Kershaw. "The [American] government has vetted us, but they're
not behind us."
Whatever the reality, the presence of arms manufacturers in the consortium,
including Allied Defense Systems and Lockheed Martin, will fuel conspiracy
theories among Arabs. Mr Ahmed says investors in Djibouti's Noor City have
the chance to "be part of modern humanity" by creating the "financial,
educational, and medical hub of Africa". Africans may wonder why the hub is
not being built in a bit of Africa where more Africans live and which has
food and water.
Unlike the Gulf States, which financed most of their development from oil
revenue, Djibouti and Yemen are too poor to provide more than scrubland. Mr
Ahmed says his firm will finance a new railway through Yemen to connect the
new cities with Dubai. He is vaguer about Africa, where a motorway and
railway would have to be built to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, and on to
Kenya's Nairobi and Sudan's Khartoum, if it is really to help perk up the
continent's economy.