The cheers of the Qatar 2022 football World Cup risk drowning out the voices of migrant workers exploited to build the tournament's lavish infrastructure.
The 2022 football World Cup, one of the most important sporting events of the coming decade, will be hosted by Qatar. The Arab bid beat that of the United States in 2010, in a selection process that was allegedly undermined by corruption. A further scandal concerns the violation of human rights on Qatari construction sites. The small country, rich in oil reserves, has the highest GDP per capita in the world. Nevertheless, the millions of migrants who are building the World Cup infrastructure work and live in undignified conditions, trapped within a system known as kafala, which has been likened to slavery.
Qatar has a population of two million, 85 per cent of whom are migrants coming primarily from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. These figures make it the country with the highest rate of immigration per capita in the world. The government maintains that a further 500,000 workers will be needed to complete the infrastructure (at a cost of 140 million dollars).
In Qatar, migrants work mainly in the construction sector or in domestic service. They are permitted to work in the country — as in other Gulf states — only with the backing of a guarantor, known as a kafeel. It is the kafala system that binds employees and employers in so tight a relationship that workers cannot leave the country or change jobs without the kafeel's permission.
Fifa, the international organisation that governs football, has publicly condemned the working conditions found in Qatar, as have sponsors Visa and Coca Cola. Some of the most important human rights organisations, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International, have likened the kafala system to forced labour and have described the government's commitment to safeguarding workers' rights as unsatisfactory. In a 2013 report, Amnesty revealed that many employers confiscate the passports of prospective employees as soon as they enter Qatar. Furthermore, a 2012 Human Rights Watch investigation revealed that more than a third of workers were not being paid regularly.
Construction workers put in very long hours under the scorching desert heat, and many of them live in squalid dormitories. This situation is so embarrassing for the Qatari government that in May the authorities arrested a BBC journalist, who had been invited to visit one of the new labour camps under construction, for venturing into one of the old accommodation blocks. Workers have no means of challenging these conditions: the law prohibits the formation of trade unions, and they also lack adequate access to the judicial system, as highlighted by a 2014 report by the International Trade Union Confederation (Ituc).
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These facts attracted particular attention when architect Zaha Hadid, who designed the World Cup stadium Al-Wakrah, walked out of a BBC interview after the journalist mentioned the deaths of workers at the stadium construction site. The interviewer took it as given that people had died, while Hadid thought otherwise.
It is difficult to estimate how many workers have lost their lives on construction sites in Qatar and whether these accidents are actually connected to the World Cup, given that the government releases no information. In 2014, the Ituc estimated that 1,200 migrant workers would have lost their lives since work began ahead of the World Cup. It remains unclear how these people died; indeed, many consider it impossible to link the victims to the tournament. Furthermore, the Ituc notes that Qatar's infrastructure programme — which includes a metro, hotels, an airport, roads, skyscrapers, sports facilities and even an entirely new city — has been designed entirely around the event.
Even if Hadid may be right to maintain that no workers died on her project, the fact that no one knows how many migrants have actually died, let alone why, is absurd. Responsibility lies with the Qatari government and Fifa, who cannot simply remain passive in the face of the reality of labour exploitation, as Amnesty has stressed. Evidently, the glitter of the World Cup is so blinding that the event must go ahead even in the face of these revelations.
Translated by Camilla Soldati