Col Rabih Alenezi says he was ordered to evict villagers from a tribe in the Gulf state to make way for The Line, part of the Neom eco-project.

One of them was subsequently shot and killed for protesting against eviction.

The Saudi government and Neom management refused to comment.

Neom, Saudi Arabia’s $500bn (£399bn) eco-region, is part of its Saudi Vision 2030 strategy which aims to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from oil.

Its flagship project, The Line, has been pitched as a car-free city, just 200m (656ft) wide and 170km (106 miles) long - though only 2.4km of the project is reportedly expected to be completed by 2030.

    • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      The pyramids were built by well paid craftsmen. This will end up being built by de facto slaves from other countries.

      • PugJesus@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        The pyramids were built by well paid craftsmen.

        Designed, certainly. But constructed by peasant corvée.

          • PugJesus@kbin.social
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            6 months ago

            If not slaves, then who were these workers? Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who has been excavating a “workers’ cemetery” just above Lehner’s city on the plateau, sees forensic evidence in the remains of those buried there that pyramid building was hazardous business. Why would anyone choose to perform such hard labor? The answer, says Lehner, lies in understanding obligatory labor in the premodern world. “People were not atomized, separate, individuals with the political and economic freedom that we take for granted. Obligatory labor ranges from slavery all the way to, say, the Amish, where you have elders and a strong sense of community obligations, and a barn raising is a religious event and a feasting event. If you are a young man in a traditional setting like that, you may not have a choice.” Plug that into the pyramid context, says Lehner, “and you have to say, ‘This is a hell of a barn!’”

            Lehner currently thinks Egyptian society was organized somewhat like a feudal system, in which almost everyone owed service to a lord. The Egyptians called this “bak.” Everybody owed bak of some kind to people above them in the social hierarchy.

            That’s literally corvée.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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              6 months ago

              You do know that everyone else who wasn’t a priest or a royal lived even worse lives than that, right?

              • PugJesus@kbin.social
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                6 months ago

                Okay, great, I see our argument is “Words don’t matter, corvee isn’t corvee, unskilled labor isn’t unskilled labor; because they lived in a barracks and were fed well”.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                  6 months ago

                  Corvée (French: [kɔʁve] ⓘ) is a form of unpaid forced labour that is intermittent in nature, lasting for limited periods of time, typically only a certain number of days’ work each year. Statute labour is a corvée imposed by a state for the purposes of public works.[1] As such it represents a form of levy (taxation). Unlike other forms of levy, such as a tithe, a corvée does not require the population to have land, crops or cash.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvée

                  How does that describe pyramid workers?

                  • PugJesus@kbin.social
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                    6 months ago

                    How does that describe pyramid workers?

                    unpaid

                    forced labour

                    intermittent

                    imposed by a state

                    for the purposes of public works

                    I’m not seeing the unskilled Egyptian workers we’re talking about here miss any of these criteria.

                    What do you think ‘obligatory labor’ in the context of a ‘feudal’-like system for the Pharaoh by commoners on a massive construction project is exactly?

    • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Pharaos probably were like “build my tomb inside a golden tower that reaches the stars” and a couple years later, “OK, a pointy 400 foot high pile of rocks will have to do I guess”.