This is not a world without misery, squalor, servitude, and slavery. These things, as much as they should be stamped out, remain tenaciously with us. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to them, but sometimes it seems like we might as well.
But when such evil is propagated not only for the usual reasons (religion, greed, ignorance, religion…religion…) but also for the very mindless, the very unnecessary—for entertainment, for sport—then we need to take a hard look at our world’s priorities, and ask what the hell is the matter with us all.
FIFA, World Cup fans, I’m looking at you.
In 2010, the executive committee of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) announced that the 2022 World Cup tournament would be held in Doha, Qatar. The Persian Gulf emirate at once began building the infrastructure, and the dozen new stadiums, that FIFA deemed necessary for the world’s largest sporting event.
But you see, Qatar is the world’s wealthiest nation, on a per capita basis. The average income among their 280,000 citizens is nearly two hundred thousand dollars. Qataris don’t get their hands dirty.
Ninety-four percent of the manual workforce in Qatar is migrant, non-citizen, and subject to a brutal, medieval employment system called kafala, whereby the employer is considered sponsor, even quasi-owner. Employers can seize workers’ passports, withhold exit visas, and can reinterpret employment contracts at will. Workers have no recourse to the Qatari legal system. Once they arrive in the country, they are at their employers’ mercy.
The workers building the World Cup infrastructure are mainly from South Asia: India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Many say they are being paid a fraction of what they were promised before they left home. They are working in triple-digit heat and living in conditions that reporters and human-rights activists alike describe as squalor. And they’re dying like flies.
Qatar has denied that any migrant workers have died working on World Cup projects. They’re playing a language game there: defining “World Cup projects” as the stadiums only, and not counting any deaths that occurred during the infrastructure projects. Also, they’re don’t count “natural causes.” Like when a previously healthy twenty-something man dies of cardiac arrest—that’s natural causes.
There have also been suicides, scores of them. Those don’t count either.
Despite increasing attention to this ongoing human-rights calamity, both FIFA and Qatar have done next to nothing. The emirate has promised to make some changes, nearly universally characterized as “cosmetic” by human-rights watchers, to the kafala system. And FIFA? The president of that body, Sepp Blatter, hasn’t addressed these allegations at all; he has instead insisted as recently as a few months ago that it would be “impossible” to change the 2022 World Cup site. More recently, he admitted that awarding the tournament to Qatar was a mistake—but only because it will be too hot there for a summer series.
Sepp Blatter clearly has no conscience, nor shame. So the rest of the world has to be his conscience, and has to supply the shame.
Soccer fans: hundreds of workers have already died to bring you your 2022 World Cup. The International Trade Union Confederation has projected that at the present rate. the death toll will reach at least 4,000 before the games begin.
If the 2022 World Cup is held in Doha it will rightly forever be known as the Death Cup. It will be a stain on FIFA and the “beautiful game” for all time.
The only alternative is to stop this, right now; to rescue the workers trapped in Doha, to punish the Qataris responsible, and to turn FIFA into an organization that doesn’t place picayune sport above human life.
Shame on Qatar, and shame on FIFA. Their shame is monumental, and every day it grows.
