Qatar World Cup: The ‘ugly game’
Migrant workers in Qatar (file photo)
By Finan Cunningham
It is proudly known to millions of fans worldwide as the “beautiful game.” But in Qatar’s case, it is coming to be seen as the “ugly game” – owing to the appalling poverty and human suffering that underlies that country’s hosting of the Football World Cup in 2022.
What is supposed to be a resplendent spectacle of sporting skill and jubilation is rapidly turning into a sickening charnel house of human exploitation and degradation.
Some estimates reckon that up to 4,000 migrant workers will die from accidents, suicides and ill health incurred over the next decade while laboring as “modern slaves” on construction sites to host the finals in Qatar.
Thousands more workers will return to their home countries in Asia and Africa, impoverished and disabled from years of enduring hunger and super-exploitation while erecting the stadiums for one of the world’s most celebrated sporting carnivals.
Qatar’s bid for fame to become the first Middle Eastern country to ever hold the glamorous event is backfiring like a ghastly own-goal. Its ruling Al Thani monarchy – who have ruled the desert emirate since independence from Britain in 1971 – probably calculated that hosting the World Cup would elevate the tiny Persian Gulf state on the global stage.
But it’s not turning out like that. On the contrary, the event is drawing international attention to the grotesque underbelly of human suffering upon which the Qatari economy is built. From behind the gleaming facades of mirrored towers and soon-to-be-built stadiums, what is now coming to the fore is the ugly face of intensive and massive exploitation; exploitation that is nothing more than modern slavery.
And it is not just the Qatari economy that is being exposed; right across the Persian Gulf in the neighboring oil sheikhdoms of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, the same system of slavery is also being highlighted.
Concurrent reports of migrant African and Asian workers being rounded up in Saudi Arabia, lynched, shackled, beaten and deported is consonant with an entire system of slave labor that props up the Persian Gulf Arab states – whose unelected dynastic rulers are backed politically, economically and militarily by so-called Western democracies.
Despite assurances from the Qatari authorities and the tournament organizers, FIFA, reports by labor and rights groups keep revealing the same recurring story: that tens of thousands of migrant workers involved in construction projects for the 2022 World Cup are being treated like slaves and in many cases no better than animals.
The International Trade Union Confederation has condemned the “slave” conditions of workers in the gas-rich Persian Gulf state, while the United Nations’ special rapporteur on workers’ rights deplored that Qatari authorities are “tolerating slums in the richest country per capita in the world”.
When Qatar first won the bid to host the 2022 games, some two years ago, its organizing committee pledged then that it would address concerns over poor labor conditions. Recently, on the back of ongoing concerns, FIFA president Sepp Blatter visited Qatar earlier this month, only for him to later tell media that the Qatari authorities “were on track” to improve conditions.
It seems that the Qataris and Blatter are either delusional or deceitful. The FIFA president’s sanguine forecast will no doubt rekindle long-held suspicions that the Qatari monarchy “bought the World Cup” through bribes and backhanders.
Several reports and rights groups testify to “rampant” and endemic misery of migrant workers in Qatar. This misery stems from a multitude of issues: pittance pay, wages being denied for up to a year by employers, abysmal health and safety standards on construction sites causing injuries and deaths, 12 to 14-hour working days for seven days a week in summer temperatures that hit 50C, as well as workers being forced to live in cramped and squalid quarters. Some of these so-called “living” quarters (more accurately concentration camps) do not even have running water or sanitation.
Qatar, a peninsula state adjacent to Saudi Arabia, has a population of some 1.8 million. Its huge natural gas reserves make it the richest state in the world on a per capita basis. But more than 80 per cent of Qatar’s population is due to foreign workers, many of whom come from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and all of whom are subjected to the most abject exploitation.
Typically, workers’ passports are confiscated by employers. Then their wages are withheld. From then on, the worker is an indentured slave. Often, in order to re-obtain the passport in the case where the laborer is allowed to leave the country, he has to sign a paper stating that all wages have been paid – when these wages have not in fact been paid at all.
The 2022 World Cup is fuelling Qatar’s already existing construction boom. With 12 new stadiums being built to host the tournament, along with ancillary transport and accommodation infrastructure, it is calculated that the total investment for the event will be around $220 billion – more than 60 times what it cost South Africa to host the 2010 finals.
In effect, whole armies of laborers on multi-billion-dollar properties are toiling without any pay. This is raw capitalist slavery, the ultimate form of human exploitation.
And it is international engineering companies, including from France and Germany, which are reaping the benefits. It is another reason why French President Francois Hollande is sucking up to the Arab monarchies by attempting to play hardball over the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1.
But the truth is that this system of human trafficking and oppression for extracting profit has been going on for decades in the Persian Gulf Arab countries. That is why pledges by their authorities aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Exploitation and oppression of millions of migrant workers are endemic in this oil and gas region.
This appalling reality is by no means a new discovery. It is the very basis of the so-called success of the Western-backed Arab monarchies.
If the “beautiful game” can redeem itself, it is because the sport is revealing the ugly truth about the West’s Arab client regimes.
FC/NN
This article was originally published at Press TV
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Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now located in East Africa as a freelance journalist, where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring, based on eyewitness experience working in the Persian Gulf as an editor of a business magazine and subsequently as a freelance news correspondent. The author was deported from Bahrain in June 2011 because of his critical journalism in which he highlighted systematic human rights violations by regime forces. He is now a columnist on international politics for Press TV and the Strategic Culture Foundation.
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