The Gulf States are replacing underage camel jockeys with robots. Susan Hack heads to the races to report on the sport's new image

At the Al Shahaniya racetrack, a half-hour's drive into the shimmering desert outside Qatar's capital, Doha, sheikhs parked in SUVs rev their engines and fiddle with remote controls. At the starting gun's pop, cars and camels take off in a cloud of sand along the six-kilometer course, giving a busload of British and American tourists a fleeting glimpse of Qatar's latest high-tech attraction: robot camel jockeys. The tourists giggle at this clash of modern and ancient worlds, at gangly beasts carrying toddler-sized electronic riders clad in a hodgepodge of racing silks, T-shirts, and baseball caps. But robot camel jockeys are no joke. In the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman, they are replacing child jockeys, in a move many hope will finally end more than 30 years of illegal child labor, abuse, and human trafficking.

Young boys have raced camels for millennia in the nomadic culture of the desert, but in the 1970s, oil-rich governments built modern tracks and offered huge purses, transforming the sport into a big business and a weekend hobby for rich city dwellers. The camels, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, injure easily racing with a heavy load, making children the ideal choice for riders. Rather than subjecting local youngsters to the dangerous sport, camel owners recruited foreign children—as young as three years old and weighing as little as 50 pounds—from villages in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Eritrea, and other countries. Many were trafficked by people who posed as relatives, brought the boys into Arab Gulf countries, and abandoned them in remote camel-breeding camps. As tourism in the region began to take off in the late 1990s, tour operators and government travel bureaus promoted camel races as a highlight for visitors. Even now, Virgin Atlantic's online destination guide to Dubai mentions "the astonishing sight of pint-sized jockeys atop these ships of the desert."

By 2003, according to Pakistani human rights lawyer Ansar Burney, thousands of boy jockeys were living in desert camps throughout the Gulf States, where they were fed minimally, subjected to sexual abuse, and, on racing days, attached with ropes or Velcro to the humps of reluctant 1,500-pound animals that can run up to 25 miles an hour. Injuries were common: In Qatar alone, 275 children were treated for camel-racing injuries between 1992 and 2003, according to a University of Qatar study. Forty percent were hurt severely enough to require hospitalization and 17 were permanently disabled as a result of falls or from being trampled.

After years of protests by human rights organizations and the United Nations, a 2004 HBO Real Sports exposé on the practice finally embarrassed several governments into taking action: Qatar says that it repatriated all of its underage camel jockeys last summer, Oman and Kuwait prohibited children from racing, and the UAE, which had failed to enforce its own 2002 law banning child jockeys, enacted stricter legislation last July. Today in Qatar, where a major race can have a purse of $250,000, robots are filling the void. Designed by a Swiss company at the request of the Qatar Industrial Development Bank, the most sophisticated robot jockeys weigh 57 pounds, sit about two feet high, and have a 400 MHz processor, a camel heart monitor, a right hand for whipping, and a left hand to hold the rein. Entrepreneurial car mechanics have also gotten into the jockey business, fashioning robots out of cordless power drills attached to aluminum frames. The whipping action is controlled with a remote device.

Although the major races have made the switch to robots, not everyone is happy with the innovation. "It's just a whipping machine," says camel owner Sultan al Falasi, during a training session at Dubai's Nad al Sheba camel track. "For me, it's not working. My camels are running slower."

The main camel souk in Dubai still sells children's helmets and body vests, and child-welfare advocates worry that races with foreign youngsters as jockeys are still being held in private. At least some of the protective gear, however, is being used in government-sponsored "heritage races," in which UAE children ride camels for prize money, bringing this ancient Bedouin tradition full circle.