By Rhys Jameson
They promised us a World Cup unlike any previous World Cup and they have certainly delivered on that promise. Never before has so much controversy surrounded a football tournament.
Although football authorities such as FIFA have never seemed too perturbed dealing with reactionary regimes, not even Mussolini’s Italy, hosting in 1934, or the Argentine military junta, hosting in 1978, none of them attracted this level of widespread criticism. Controversy, including allegations of corruption, human rights violations and discrimination against LGBT people have followed this World Cup ever since its venue was announced.
The organisers of the 2022 World Cup have strongly denied allegations from the US Department of Justice (DOJ) that bribes were paid to secure votes when the hosting rights for the tournament were awarded 12 years ago with the Qatar authorities claiming that they had been “unfairly treated and scrutinised”. Although to be fair to the Qataris, it does take two to tango and with 50 members of FIFA prosecuted by the DOJ with various crimes such as bribery and money-laundering and with 27 people (and four corporations) pleading guilty and the seizing of over $201 million from the accounts of former FIFA officials, FIFA can hardly play the role of the innocent victim of Qatari scheming.
Same sex relationships are a criminal offence
Qatar’s law specifies that same-sex relations between men is an offence, with a punishment of up to three years in prison. The death penalty is possible under sharia law, although there are no known records of it being enforced for homosexuality, record keeping does not however seem to be Qatar’s Strength.
Qatar insists everyday reality is different and everyone is welcome, so long as they respect the culture However, the week before the World Cup saw the latest in a series of alarming statements, with former Qatari international Khalid Salman describing homosexuality as “damage in the mind”. Human Rights Watch report that the Qatar Preventive Security Department forces have arbitrarily arrested LGBTQ people and subjected them to ill-treatment, with six cases of severe and repeated beatings and five cases of sexual harassment in police custody between 2019 and 2022.
Qatar is by far the smallest country ever to host the World Cup and has no discernible footballing history. Prior to being awarded the 2022 World Cup in 2010, the national team was ranked 113 in the world. FIFA awarded the tournament to Qatar in 2010, with the understanding (then) that it would be held during the summer, when temperatures exceed 40 degrees Celsius. Since then, in 2015, the tournament was moved to the winter of 2022, despite the disruption this would have on the lucrative European leagues and competitions.
Is the Qatari mascot the ghost of a dead migrant worker?
More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died, mostly on stadium building sites in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago. That is an average of 12 migrant workers dead each week since December 2010. It should be noted that the true figure is likely to be much higher because that figure relates only to these five south Asian countries and therefore does not include figures for other countries that send significant numbers of workers to Qatar, such as the Philippines or Kenya.
Given the very scanty nature of the official figures and the lack of clarity, it is almost impossible to directly dispute the Qataris claim that there have only been 37 deaths of workers employed on building the World Cup stadia and of those, 34 are classified as “non-work related”. In fact, 69% of deaths among Indian, Nepali and Bangladeshi workers are categorised by the Qatari authorities as ‘natural’ deaths, often attributed to acute heart or respiratory failure.
These claims are usually made without an autopsy, and often fail to provide a legitimate medical explanation for the underlying cause of those deaths. However, what we can say for sure is that a very significant proportion of the migrant workers who have died since 2011 were only in the country because Qatar won the right to host the World Cup.
In 2014, the Qatar government’s own lawyers recommended that it commission a study into the deaths of migrant workers from cardiac arrest and amend the law to “allow for autopsies … in all cases of unexpected or sudden death”. Since then, the Qatari government has done neither. The UN’s International Labour Organization research in 2019 revealed, unsurprisingly for a country with summer temperatures in excess of 40oC that for at least four months of the year workers faced significant heat stress when working outside.
A report by Amnesty, Reality Check 2021, said that practices such as withholding salaries and charging workers to change jobs were still rife in Qatar, despite labour reforms in 2014. Amnesty and other rights groups have led calls for FIFA to compensate migrant workers in Qatar for human rights abuses by setting aside $440 million, matching the World Cup prize money. That points to one of the most obnoxiously offensive elements of this World Cup. Qatar has more than enough money to equitably reform their labour system and has had 12 years to start restructuring. The state has instead decided to spend fortunes on public relations, pushing back against criticisms rather than addressing them.
World Cup is a cynical exercise in sports-washing the Qatar regime.
To paraphrase the character Ace Rothstein from the movie Casino, “They are not only legitimate, but staging the World Cup. And that’s like selling people dreams for cash…For guys like them, the World Cup washes away their sins. It’s like a morality car wash. It does for them what Lourdes does for humpbacks and cripples. And along with making us legit comes cash, tons of it. I mean, what do you think we’re doing out here in the middle of the desert? It’s all this money.”
