Circumlocution

Circumlocution
The Emiratis we have been meeting (most of whom are officials or professionals representing various institutions—schools, universities, the police, the government, oil companies--) have been exceptionally welcoming, gracious, generous and affable. However, I have found that getting a straight answer from any of them, especially on a sensitive subject, is extremely unlikely. I am assuming this is partly for understandable PR reasons, and partly because of different communication styles. (Help me out here, Basma!) We often engage in question and answer sessions. The Emiratis will cheerfully answer our questions with many, many words. Yet often they either avoid the question altogether, or else briefly touch on the answer, but bury it within layers of ornate “blah blah blah.” As one of the members of my group put it, “We are tired of being circumlocuted.”
For example, this morning we visited the Ministry of the Interior, the Department of Human Rights. One Emirati mentioned that one concern they faced was human trafficking. I asked him to discuss some of the other pressing human rights issues they were facing. I took notes on his answer, which was long. His language was much more flowery than mine, but this is basically what he responded, in this order:
· The UAE is an extremely safe country; the crime rates are very low.
· The mission of the Ministry of the Interior is to main internal security.
· Fortunately, most of the people who come to this country to work and peaceful, calm, and law-abiding.
· We are dealing with human trafficking on a local, national, and international level;
· We sometimes face problems with expatriate laborers’ relationships with their employers.
· All societies have issues they must struggle with; our role is to fight these problems;
· We are trying to follow the correct procedures to solve any complaints that arise;
· UAE is very safe. People don’t come here to commit crimes; they come here to work.
· We have some procedures we use to identify criminals, such as iris scans.
· We have many responsibilities, and we are working hard to solve the problems that arise.
I bold-faced the sentence above that was sort of an answer to my problem. (Many of the foreign laborers are exploited by their employers.) The rest of the answer was a repetition of what he had already said. The same ideas were repeated in answer to almost every question that was asked.
My general “translation” of the hour-long conversation from this morning is this:
“We Emiratis are enlightened and humane. We would never violate anybody’s human rights. However, we are a nation with many foreign workers; many of these foreigners are too ignorant and low-class to understand human rights. Therefore, it will take time for us to educate them in how to behave properly.”