In a few days we will know which country’s team will be football’s next world champion. A lot of prestige comes with it, and the economy of the winning nation will get boosted by national pride. But what we know already, what we knew long before the first kick-off, was that Qatar should never, ever have hosted the world’s most widely viewed single sporting event.
Why, it forced 715 million viewers worldwide and 1.5 million visitors to forgo the joys of limitless beer, vuvuzela dim and well-meaning fistfights to brawl over the rights of transgender people instead.
The barrage of critique flowing through Western media was puzzling. First was the accusation of bribery: A small desert nation of three million residents, only in existence since 1971, with no football tradition to talk of and no venues to host the event, could only have launched their winning bid by trickery.
Grudgers seemed vindicated when Qatar was embargoed in 2017 by its bullying neighbours Saudi Arabia and UAE shutting ports and air links to the country and sealing off its border.
Qatar, which shares a vast gas field with Iran, was excoriated for its peaceful neighbourly relations with the Islamic Republic and its diplomatic ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia demanded that Qatar’s comparably liberal news outlet Al Jazeera ‒ critical about the war in Yemen, political oppression in Egypt and its extradition of human rights campaigners to Saudi Arabia – should be shut down. The Trump-endorsed embargo lasted until 2021, hampering FIFA preparations.
Then there was the complaint that desert nations were principally ill-suited to host outdoor sport events and the practical solution to host the games in November and December when temperatures are temperate was criticised for interfering with the European club calendar. The idea that an Arab country should for once host the quadrennial tournament was ridiculed: Why, Arabs don’t play football.
Qatar is a conservative country, rooted in tribal and Muslim traditions and irritatingly religious, despite its advances in higher education, its worldliness, its newfound wealth and its globally-thinking elites. Women’s rights are still evolving and a far cry from Western conventions, which are at times found wanting too, one should admit.
Values that our liberal elites have become accustomed to, like respect for trans-people and their right to free gender choice, are considered abominations. The former Qatari football player Khalid Salman, now FIFA ambassador, views homosexuality as sinful, “a damage to the mind”, as he confined recently to a German news outlet. This does not conform to our value canon. My parents, born in the early 1930s, would tacitly agree with the ambassador, I have to admit.
The most damning critique was directed against the Qatari abuse of foreign labour. According to The Guardian, a British newspaper, 6,500 workers have died building the eight stadiums and the lavish infrastructure to host the games. This figure was picked up by all Western news outlets. I too was deeply shocked, visualising the poor souls plunging from unsecured scaffoldings and dying of dehydration.
The Guardian arrived at this figure by asking the embassies of immigrant countries like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan about reported deaths of their nationals in Qatar since construction works started. But they did not specifically ask about the circumstances of the deceased persons’ deaths and their trade.
We should pick our enemies and allies with a sober calculus- Andreas Weitzer
This figure was so shockingly high that I tried to do some math. The entire foreign labour force in Qatar comprises about 2.7 million people. (Yes, there are only 300,000 native Qataris).
The worldwide death rate in 2021 was 0.86%. Applying the same death rate to the 2.7 million foreign workers slaving away in Qatar, 23,220 immigrants should have died per annum, or 232,200 in 10 years. So was the opportunity of working in Qatar, in fact, a life-saving experience with wages attached?
This is, of course, statistical deceit, as only working age people will migrate to Qatar, excluding all the elderly or infirm who have a higher mortality rate. But it is equally deceptive to attribute those 650 annual deaths to working conditions on the FIFA construction sites. Migrants coming to Qatar have all kind of jobs – actually they have most of the jobs available ‒ and they die of multiple reasons, even of old age.
Working conditions for foreign workers throughout the Arab world are dire. Loans are meagre, employers have unlimited power, workers have no right of redress. No one can leave the country without permission of his or her assigned taskmaster. To quit is impossible.
Quite unjustly, perhaps due to the world’s scrutiny, working conditions for foreigners have improved considerably in Qatar, and are today more humane than in any other Gulf state. Admittedly, labour standards in unionised Germany they are not. But then, not one of those immigrants would be ever welcomed in Germany.
And, most abhorrently, Qatar is not a democracy. I am not sure if all these complaints justify cancelling or boycotting the event or to get into a lather about Qatar. Qatar is, after all, a comparably peaceful autocracy. It does not chop critical journalists into pieces; it does not wage war in Yemen; it is not threatening to erase Israel from the face of the earth, and is not exporting Islamism like its powerful neighbour. It is not racist. It replaces without much fuss the gas that Russia is withholding from us.
We never examined gay rights in Russia on the occasion of the FIFA World Cup in 2018, or questioned the Russian pastime of killing Central Asian immigrant workers. Nobody considered boycotting the Russian games after the occupation of large swathes of Ukraine in 2014, and found nothing dingy with China at the Winter Olympics 2022 when we knew that 1.5 million Uighur Muslims were sterilised and tortured in concentration camps.
Keir Starmer, UK Labour leader, is okay with COP27 in Egypt, which imprisons 60,000 political opponents, but refuses to travel to Doha in support of Team England. Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, is banning Qatari ads in London buses and the metro, preferring to raise ticket costs instead.
Olympic Games were invented by the ancient Greeks as a peace initiative. Even nations at war with each other were welcomed. This does not mean that a host nation should be exempt from critique. Qataris must have known that they will be under a magnifying glass.
They must have hoped that their attempt to modernise will be recognised too. This did not happen. In a climate of dangerous great power confrontations, we should pick our enemies and allies with a more sober calculus. Not all countries we wish to get on board are impeccable democracies.
We should also question the rationale of big sporting events. Do we need them? Most democracies will have a hard time to legitimise expenditure like Qatar’s USD220 billion. Football fans are a minority, after all, even in countries like Germany and Britain. If yes: do we want them to be globally inclusive, embracing African and Asian football too, which in order to prosper need the FIFA money earned at mega events like in Qatar (USD7.5 billion). Or do we prefer billionaires’ clubs closer to home? I don’t know.
But to pick on a small country which tries to punch above its weight just because it is rich and Muslim and not quite up to our LGBT standards is out of place.
Andreas Weitzer is an independent journalist based in Malta.
The purpose of this column is to broaden readers’ general financial knowledge and it should not be interpreted as presenting investment advice, or advice on the buying and selling of financial products.
andreas.weitzer@timesofmalta.com