“You’re Essentially a Prisoner”: Why Do Dubai’s Princesses Keep Trying to Escape?
First
Princess Latifa tried to flee by boat and almost made it to
India—before being sent back. Then Princess Haya, Sheikh Mohammed’s
“public wife,” refused to return from England. Now the sheikh is
battling her in court over their children.
Princess
Haya Bint al-Hussein of Jordan leaves the Royal Courts of Justice,
accompanied by lawyer Fiona Shackleton in London, July 31, 2019; with
Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum at the third day of the Royal
Ascot in 2016.Left by ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP; right, by Chris Jackson, both from Getty Images.
Amid
the fine horses competing in this year’s Royal Ascot, the red-coated
postilions driving the Queen of England in her carriage, and the rabble
in immense grandstands, one man stands in the event’s most exclusive VIP
area wearing a black silk hat.
This accessory is a rarity for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who more often wears the traditional headscarf and white robe, or kandura,
of Dubai, one of the seven states that make up the United Arab
Emirates. “Sheikh Mo,” as he’s called, has been the leader of Dubai for
13 years. He’s thought of as a progressive who bows to the laws of
capitalism as well as the mosque, and so unlike the dictators of old
that he writes his own poetry. “Mohammed is articulate, erudite, and
suave—a Davos type,” says a businessman who has dined with him in Dubai.
A major landowner in Britain and one of the largest racehorse owners in
the world, Sheikh Mohammed is even friends with the Queen of England,
who adores horses so much that she has made more than $8 million in
betting rounds over the past 30 years. In a typically passionate piece
of writing, Sheikh Mohammed has described horses as “symbolizing pride,
self-esteem, tenderness, and strength all at once.”
Sheikh Mohammed normally attends the race with his “public wife,” Princess Haya bint al-Hussein,
whose father, King Hussein, was the truly progressive leader of Jordan
for decades. Haya, the first Arab woman equestrian to compete in the
Olympics, representing Jordan in show jumping during the 2000 Sydney
summer games, seemed like the perfect wife for the sheikh: a paragon of
the new Arabia, independent but also devoted to her man. Educated at the
University of Oxford and with highlights in her hair, she’s also the
first woman in Jordan to own a driver’s license for heavy machinery—she
wanted to be able to transport her own horses to the track. “Haya is
very intelligent,” says Sven Holmberg, who served with
her on the International Federation for Equestrian Sports. He claims
that she would arrive to meetings via the sheikh’s jet and donated
millions towards a home in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the federation’s
use—though Holmberg says he clashed with her over the use of
controversial drugs in the sport, which she apparently supported more
than him.
Given
the general swoon that Haya and Sheikh Mohammed seemed to be in, the
surprise today is not that Sheikh Mohammed arrived out of his usual
garb. The surprise is that he’s alone—without not only Haya, but also
any of his other wives, which have numbered at least six; he’s also
reportedly fathered 30 children. In fact, shortly after the Ascot this
past June, news began pinging around the world that Haya had fled Dubai
months earlier—and two of Sheikh Mohammed’s daughters had also
experienced duress. One of them, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, 33, attempted to escape Dubai in 2018 on a boat registered in the U.S. and piloted by a French-American captain.
The
picture starting to come together of this emir was less progressive,
where women are concerned, than anyone imagined. And this week,
beginning November 12, London’s family court will preside over the
custody dispute between Sheikh Mohammed and Haya. He is reportedly suing
her for the return of their two children, seven and 11 years of age, to
Dubai. (Neither Sheikh Mohammed nor Haya responded to requests from Vanity Fair for interviews.) British papers are calling the divorce one of the highest-profile royal breakups since Prince Charles
and Princess Diana, and, with Sheikh Mohammed’s fortune most recently
estimated at $4 billion, the most expensive separation in the history of
their country.
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Shiekh Mohamed and Princess Haya married in 2004. From Royal Palace/Getty Images.
The
story of Sheikh Mohammed and Haya’s parting of ways is a winding tale,
full of unexpected twists and turns and the font of so many rumors that I
could barely keep them straight. The Gulf states are involved in an
information warfare campaign at the moment—in particular, the UAE and
Saudi Arabia are pitted against Qatar—and conspiracy theories in many
realms abound. It’s possible to even hear impassioned explanations of
how the real killers of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and Washington Post
reporter, were actually Qatari spies who framed the Saudis to get back
at them for the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. (And, by the way, part of
why the Saudis blockaded the country was said to be jealousy over Qatar
landing the 2022 World Cup.)
Theories about Haya’s departure, too,
have come hot and heavy. Facts are scant—and certainly not found in the
public square. It is simply understood that the emir’s wives and
daughters are off-limits as a subject of chatter. “It is said that human
scorpions dwell on the earth in the form of gossipers and conspirators,
who trouble souls, destroy relationships, and subvert the spirit of
communities and teams,” is the way that Sheikh Mohammed has described
loose talk.
But in private among Arabian experts, royal watchers,
and journalists in the West, each move in Haya’s departure from Dubai
has been scrutinized. Many question why Sheikh Mohammed, who is known to
keep close tabs on his citizens, would have allowed his wife to leave
when Dubai has more surveillance than anywhere on Earth, with 35,000
cameras trained on street corners (Washington, D.C., only has about
4,000). If the sheikh had an inkling that things were awry in his
marriage, wouldn’t he have asked one of his ministers to monitor his
wife’s digital footprint, and even revoke her privileges on their
(multiple) private planes?
Many are also questioning what exactly
Haya’s escape may have to do with Sheikh Mohammed’s daughter Latifa
fleeing on a yacht and if the two departures are linked. The downside of
monarchical prerogative may be felt through the heirs, as it is so
often. The sheikh needs to run his state and keep his offspring from
embarrassing him, and he may do that in a strict and potentially brutal
way.
And, in yet another theory, British papers made much of
Haya’s alleged closeness to a bodyguard. In a poem about an unnamed
woman Sheikh Mohammed put online around the same time that she
disappeared, he wrote, “O you who betrayed the most precious of trust/
My sorrow revealed your game,” he writes. “You loosened the reins of
your horse.”
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Haya
and Sheikh Mohammed first had a romantic spark at a horse race in Spain
and later married in 2004. Their nuptials were not arranged, but,
before they became a couple, oil-poor Jordan was in financial distress;
these days, the UAE is reportedly one of the country’s largest
investors.
Haya may have been raised in the royal family in
Jordan, but Dubai is a very different kind of monarchy. Jordan’s royal
family runs more on the British model: the princes and princesses have
patronage, run organizations, and are highly visible (the American-born Queen Noor,
who became Haya’s stepmother after Haya’s mother died in a helicopter
crash when she was two, comes to mind). But Dubai’s monarchy is mostly
closed and private. Sheikh Mohammed’s first wife, Sheikha Hind bint Maktoum bin Juma al-Maktoum, with whom he has 12 children, has rarely, if ever, been in a photograph seen by the public in 40 years of marriage.
Though
women in Dubai are increasingly becoming business and governmental
leaders, the Emirates also enforces the law of male guardianship, which
means that husbands and fathers control the destiny of their daughters
and wives. Women can only work with permission of their husbands; must
have a lawful excuse for any refusal to submit to sex with their
husbands; and any unmarried woman, Emirati or expat, who appears at a
hospital pregnant in Dubai can be arrested, including a woman having a
miscarriage. Perhaps most importantly for Haya, any woman who divorces
her Emirati husband and seeks to remarry must grant full custody of her
children to her first spouse.
In Dubai’s royal family, for women,
life may be stricter. “You have the fancy title of being a princess, and
of course you have people waiting on you [hand and foot], but you’re
essentially a prisoner,” says an Arab dissident. “You’re not supposed to
socialize. You don’t have a normal life.” Though some women in Dubai’s
royal family are educated abroad and have public profiles, others simply
bear children, spend their monthly stipend, and remain quiet. “If you
want to be in favor, you buy into what the king does. If you’re not,
you’re pushed aside and nobody really cares about you—you’re not a
high-profile monarchy anyway,” says a source with knowledge of Dubai’s
royals.
By the time she became involved with Sheikh Mohammed, if
not before, one would think Haya would have known all of this. “I think
Princess Haya falls into the category of the type of princess who
learned that once you marry into the family, you have to play by their
rules. And their rules include self-preservation at all costs,” says the
source, who has an understanding of the region. She must certainly have
been aware that by the time they were married, something odd had
already happened to one of the sheikh’s daughters.
In 2001, according to The Guardian, Sheikh Mohammed’s daughter Sheikha Shamsa bint Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum,
a tall, dark-eyed college student and equestrian who once came in
behind Princess Anne in a long-distance horse race, abandoned her black
Range Rover near the stables at the family’s Surrey estate. When the
vehicle was discovered the following morning, Sheikh Mohammed took a
helicopter from another racing area to join the hunt. Shamsa was
eventually found in Cambridge, after which she was reportedly snatched
by bodyguards and returned to Dubai; her father followed up by moving 80
horses off the property and firing nearly all of the estate’s staff.
When
this news spilled into the press—via Shamsa hiring a London barrister
and also reportedly calling British police from Dubai—there was an
outcry. In London, the government opened an investigation into whether
she had been taken out of the country “against her will.” But the
investigation apparently languished, and Shamsa remained in Dubai,
though she has not appeared in a photograph circulating on the internet
or elsewhere in the intervening 18 years.
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Sheikh Mohammed and Princess Haya with their daughter, Al Jalila. By Steve Parsons/PA Images/Getty Images.
This
was curious on its own, but not as curious as the case of Shamsa’s
younger sister Latifa. Known as a daredevil for her expert skydiving,
Latifa even appeared on the cover of the local newspaper, according to Jim Krane, author of City of Gold,
a contemporary history of Dubai. “Latifa was portrayed as an
über-princess who, like her brothers and dad, had taken on the world,
doing risky things like skydiving and enjoying life,” says Krane.
But
behind the scenes, Latifa claimed to have a terrible relationship with
her mother and barely any relationship with Sheikh Mohammed at all,
according to Tiina Jauhianinen, a Finnish woman who was
Latifa’s personal capoeira instructor—and who, bizarrely, became part
of Latifa’s escape plan. The sheikh’s own mother was also named Latifa,
which he has said means “friendly, kind, and supportive” in Arabic.
“Latifa in life was my mother—my heart and soul…my mother was unique,
tranquil, and gentle,” he wrote in one of his books. “My mother loved
all her children deeply, but I always felt I was closest to her
heart…She ate only after we ate. She rested only after we were asleep,
and she rejoiced only after our grief had dissipated.” But his daughter,
this Latifa, would be someone quite different.
At the highest
level of Arab royalty, men often house their wives in different palaces,
and this is thought to be the case with Sheikh Mohammed, says
Jauhianinen. “Mohammed has so many official wives and unofficial
wives—all these families are separate and barely know each other,” she
says. “The wives and daughters might meet at public events like
weddings, where the women’s wedding is separate from the men’s. How they
know each other is very much based on their social media profiles: ‘Oh,
this person has a better life, this person gets to travel.’”
At
Latifa’s family’s palace, every care was satisfied by Filipino maids,
says Jauhianinen. She even had her own leisure center with a pool, yoga
room, and rooms for hairdressers and manicurists. But she wanted little
to do with the five-star lifestyle: she spent most of her time at the
family’s stables, caring for horses and her pet monkey. She became a
vegan, cooking her own curries, and said she liked animals more than
humans, according to Jauhianinen.
Latifa was also plotting
something dramatic. In a YouTube video claiming Shamsa had been kept
under house arrest and drugged after her escape, and that she herself
had also been imprisoned in solitary confinement and beaten when she
tried to escape to Oman and stick up for Shamsa, Latifa apparently
bought a book written by an apparent French former spy Hervé Jaubert; the title of the book was Escape From Dubai. And that’s exactly what she planned to do.
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According
to Jauhianinen, on February 24, 2018, she and Latifa had a royal driver
drop them off at a café where they often met for breakfast. In the
bathroom, Latifa took off her black abaya, applied makeup, and put on
sunglasses. She also dropped her cell phone into a garbage can. Then,
Jauhianinen says, the two of them drove to the border of Oman, where
they met Jaubert, who would pilot the yacht, and one of his crew, who
had brought along Jet Skis. They rode the skis about 15 miles out to
their boat. “It was very rough sea, in the middle of the ocean—just the
craziest day ever,” says Jauhianinen. They planned to make it to Sri
Lanka, and after that, the United States. Latifa had thought about
heading for the United Kingdom, but was worried that her father’s
connections would make it hard for the country to allow her to remain,
Jauhianinen says.
This motley crew sailed for eight days, eating
granola bars because there were too many roaches in the kitchen to cook.
Nervously, via a slow-moving internet connection, they tried to get in
touch with Western journalists who might spread the word that they
needed protection. They thought the satellite connection they were
using, which came from the U.S., would not be penetrated. But about 30
miles off the coast of Goa, India, with Jauhianinen and Latifa below
deck in their bunk, they heard gunshots. They locked the door, but the
Indian coast guard threw a grenade. Their cabin began filling with
smoke. They made it up the stairs to the deck, staggering from coughing
so hard. Upstairs, the sky was black, except for the tiny, red laser
dots of the guns that Indian men were pointing at them.
Lying on
the deck, handcuffed, Latifa kept repeating, “I am seeking political
asylum,” but the men wouldn’t listen. Soon a warship from the Emirates
pulled up, and those men began to board the boat. “One of the crew
members said, ‘These men are here to save us from the Indians,’ but of
course that’s not what was happening,” says Jauhianinen.
Dubai had
gotten in touch with India and told them one of Sheikh Mohammed’s
daughters had been kidnapped. “India is dependent on UAE remittances
from their citizens making money in Dubai and sending it home—there’s
seven-to-one Indians to Emiratis in Dubai,” explains Jim Krane, the City of Gold author. “That’s a lot of funds coming back home. They’re eager to help Dubai where they can.”
Latifa
disappeared with some of the men; Jauhianinen and the rest of the crew
were left on the boat, which was sent back to Dubai, where they were
blindfolded, cuffed, and imprisoned, Jauhianinen says. That evening,
Jauhianinen’s interrogation began: “They wanted to know who was behind
this and what the ultimate goal was. They couldn’t believe I was just
helping my friend who wants to be free.” She says the guards talked
about Latifa as if she were a minor who didn’t know what was best for
her or knew the meaning of freedom. To them, she had all the freedom a
woman could possibly need while living in the UAE.
Princess Haya in London, 2019. By Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images.
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It’s
unclear if Jauhianinen or any of the crew would have been let out of
UAE prison if it weren’t for a clever trick of Latifa’s: Before leaving,
she posed in front of a white wall next to pink drapes, her black hair
pulled back in a ponytail, and recorded a 40-minute video explaining her
reasons for wanting to leave Dubai. “If you are watching this video,
it’s not such a good thing. Either I’m dead or in a very, very bad
situation.” She added, “Freedom of choice is not something that we have.
So when you have it, you take it for granted, and when you don’t have
it, it’s very, very, special.”
She comes off as smart, frustrated,
and extremely rational. Between this viral video, now with 4 million
views, and, some months later, a BBC documentary on Latifa—which spurred
the United Nations to request that Sheikh Mohammed furnish
proof-of-life of Latifa at once—Dubai began to feel pressure to publicly
respond. (Jauhianinen was soon sprung from prison, though she says
guards tried to scare her even upon release, saying, “What happened to
Princess Diana was not an accident.”)
In the Arab world, behind
closed doors, many questioned if Latifa was telling the truth. “That’s
not the M.O. of Arab princes, to torture their kids,” says the source
with knowledge of the region. “We’re all familiar with claims of Saudi
and UAE princes doing all kinds of crazy stuff in hotels in London,
abusing Filipino maids, and weird things in L.A. But the families have
good ways of covering that up: paying people off, dismissing people.”
The source says he doesn’t think the type of torture Latifa describes,
and grabbing kids out of the country, is the way they’d do it.
Unlike
Saudi Arabia, the UAE is not known to often track down citizens who
have left the Emirates. But they might make an exception for a princess.
“People assume the richer you are, the more freedom you have, but it’s
almost the inverse—the more powerful the family, the more they can force
you to return to the country,” says Rothna Begum, women’s rights researcher for the Middle East and North Africa region at Human Rights Watch.
Under
pressure, Sheikh Mohammed’s court released a statement saying they were
“aware and deeply saddened by the continued media speculation regarding
Her Highness.” All they wanted was to create a “stable and happy
future” for Latifa, in privacy and peace, it read. They also claimed the
captain of the ship and others had asked for a ransom of $100 million
to return Latifa; Jaubert has reportedly maintained he was only paid a
sum of about $390,000 from Latifa for expenses related to her escape.
This
statement, from Sheikh Mohammed, simply fanned the flames of
speculation even more; now everyone wanted to see Latifa, to know she
was okay, or at least alive. And while Latifa and Haya reportedly barely
knew each other and had met only at formal events, according to
Jauhianinen, Haya, whose global reputation was utterly spotless until
this point, stepped into the breach. As a UN Messenger of Peace, she had
become friendly with Mary Robinson, the first female
president of Ireland in the 1990s and now a humanitarian. Now, Haya
apparently asked Robinson to fly to Dubai and help sort out the
situation with Latifa, which Haya called a “family dilemma.”
It’s
unclear if, before her trip, Robinson knew that she would be asked to
take pictures and make a public statement in Dubai. But after a day of
talking with the family and walking through their gardens, she sat down
at lunch with Latifa while photographers snapped shots of the two of
them at the table. Robinson smiles courteously, but Latifa, for her
part, looks confused. Her hair is barely brushed. She is wearing jeans
and a dark purple sweatshirt, a somewhat inappropriate costume for a
formal and photographed lunch. In perhaps a self-protective move, she
had zipped her sweatshirt all the way to the top.
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Robinson
explained, to the press, that Latifa was “troubled.” She continued,
“She made a video that she now regrets and she planned an escape, or
what was part of a plan of escape.” Robinson said Latifa needed
psychiatric care, and she was comforted that Dubai’s royal family was
administering it.
Now this was quite the bit of royal theater and,
in the West, considered overwhelmingly strange. In Ireland, Robinson
was immediately called out as a stooge for the Dubai royal family—and
Haya raced to her defense. On one of Ireland’s top radio programs, Haya
did her best to defend her friend. Haya said she’d called Robinson
because when “faced with a situation in life that’s so profound and it’s
deeply attached to your values, your family, and situations that are
complex and difficult, I’ve always learned in my life to ask for
counsel.” She added, “It is a private family matter and I don’t want to
go any more deeply into it for the protection of Latifa herself, and to
ensure she’s not used by anyone else.”
Even as the interviewer
pressed her for answers about Latifa, Haya refused to give more details
about her stepdaughter’s departure and simply kept stressing that she
was “really, really, very, very sorry that my actions have led to the
criticism of a person that I so deeply respect and admire,” meaning
Robinson. Haya also added, “If I thought for a second any shred of this
was true,” meaning Latifa’s story about feeling oppressed, misused, and
imprisoned, “I wouldn’t put up with it or stand for it.”
Several months later, Haya left Dubai.
She
didn’t flee to her home country Jordan, but perhaps, given Jordan’s
reliance on the UAE for financial support, she felt she couldn’t put her
brother, the current king, in a sticky position. Instead, she went to
Germany, which she likely considered the most independent Western
country in Europe, without strong ties to Jordan or the UAE.
But
for reasons that are unknown, either possibly related to Germany not
accepting her or her choosing to move on, Haya then left for London, a
far riskier place for her to be. Sheikh Mohammed owns so much property
in Britain that he could make his influence felt there.
Between
Latifa’s strange escape on the yacht, the Mary Robinson fiasco, and
Haya’s departure, many people have connected the dots and speculated
that Haya must have indeed found out something about Latifa that she
couldn’t “put up with or stand for.” And yet, Haya left with so much
money—almost $40 million—that others wonder if she and Sheikh Mohammed
hadn’t actually worked out their separation before she departed. There
was some friction over the marriage in Dubai: Haya wanted to open
institutes and travel the world, and two sources say that Sheikh
Mohammed’s sons were not enthusiastic about these pursuits. As the
sheikh grows older, those sons have more influence. Haya could just be
an opportunist looking to leave her husband who saw an opening to gain
moral high ground by making everyone think she fled in solidarity with
Latifa.
But if Sheikh Mohammed did allow Haya to leave, what is
one to make of his next move on the chess board: suing her in London for
the custody of their two children? “The question for me, and everyone
else, is, why did he make this application?” says David Haigh,
a British lawyer who was once imprisoned for accusations of fraud in
Dubai and is now working on a campaign to free Latifa from the country.
“It just seems odd that he’s putting himself up to the international
scrutiny. I mean, he must be so arrogant.”
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Most
experts think that it’s possible Sheikh Mohammed is suing Haya in
London to make it clear to the world that he will not allow his wives to
leave the country with his offspring without consequences. Haya has
responded to Sheikh Mohammed’s suit by reportedly asking for a type of
protection usually used for domestic violence victims and by requesting a
forced marriage protection order for her children,
even though the sheikh isn’t known to force children into
marriage—that’s not the way he operates. What he allegedly did to
Latifa, however, is likely to be very important to the case, and, if
true, could establish that any children returned to him in Dubai are in
danger.
Haigh says what’s important for people to understand about
Dubai is “just because they have big towers and do concerts on the
beach with Champagne, it is not a democracy. It is a police state run by
a couple of men who are accountable to no one. And that means that,
ultimately, the only one who can open the door to Latifa’s cage is her
father.” Haigh talks for a bit about the experience Latifa and others
had on the boat when it was seized in India. “There were six people on
that boat,” he says. “We got five people off, but for Latifa, nothing
works, because there’s no person in charge of Sheikh Mohammed.”
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