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11 months ago
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SAUDI Arabia has taken its megalomania to yet another level as the kingdom unveiled plans for two 900ft jagged skyscrapers on the Red Sea coast.
Epicon, Neom’s latest project, is set to be a futuristic sky-high city featuring residential beach villas, hotels, and a luxurious resort.
NEOM
NEOMLocated on the Gulf of Aqaba, Epicon will be made up of two ultra-modern towers, measuring 738ft and 908ft.
The ultra-lux destination will be home to 41 hotels and luxury homes, offering 14 suites and hotel apartments.
Close to the spiky towers, Epicon’s will have its own resort with 120 rooms and 45 stunning residential beach villas – with a beach club and spas.
Guests and residents will have access to swimming pools and lounges in “a truly immersive and life-affirming experience,” Saudi says.
Epicon is one of the many ambitious projects in Saudi Arabia as the kingdom is spending £1trillion as it seeks to ditch its reliance on oil.
Through massive investments as part of Saudi Arabia Vision 2030, the nation has been unveiling wildly ambitious projects funded by oil billions at an unprecedented rate.
In line with the megalomania vision of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi is desperate to be the centre of the world.
The price of each project is not known – but Saudi is set to spend an outlandish $175billion every year on mega projects between 2025 and 2028.
But beneath the glitzy facade lies a story of threats, forced evictions and bloodshed.
Many projects have faced fierce criticism over human rights abuses – including the $500billion Neom project where tribes were shoved out of their homeland, imprisoned or executed.
At least 20,000 members of the Huwaitat tribe face eviction, with no information about where they will live in the future.
Authorities in the port city of Jeddah also demolished many houses to implement Saudi’s development plans – with thousands of locals evicted illegally.
One campaigner claimed “Neom is built on Saudi blood”.
Jeed Basyouni, Middle East director of the human rights organisation Reprieve, told DW: “We have seen, time and again, that anyone who disagrees with the crown prince, or gets in his way, risks being sentenced to jail or to death.”
Neom is set to be a Jetsons-style ultra-modern metropolis in contrast to the other very conservative parts of the desert kingdom.
Backed by Saudi’s $500billion Private Investment Fund – the group which bought Newcastle United – the plans for Neom are so ambitious that some of the technology doesn’t even exist yet.
The city will be located on the border with Jordan and Egypt and will start welcoming residents and businesses by 2025.
It is being “built from scratch”, powered by solar and wind, will be 17 times the size of London and “a centre for the development of robotics”.
Planning docs show the city will have flying taxis – a vehicle depicted in science fiction films such as Blade Runner and Back to the Future II.
The most striking thing about Neom is a mirrored megastructure called The Line – a 110-mile, 500m tall and 200m wide mirrored building that will connect Neom to the rest of the kingdom.
But Basyouni, from Reprieve, said “the glossy brochures don’t show that this is a city being built on forcible evictions, state violence and death sentence”.
Campaigners say two towns have been cleared and 20,000 members of the Huwaitat tribe forcibly removed, without compensation, in order to build the megacity.
In September last year, three tribe members were allegedly executed for opposing eviction from the construction site.
Basyouni said Neom represents the “gulf between Mohammed bin Salman’s professed ‘vision’ of Saudi Arabia and the repressive reality of his rule”.
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