Qatar 2022, a boycott looming in the midst of a tragedy

The concessions were diverse. From changing the almost unimaginable schedule of European football to accepting to play with an excruciating temperature. With the help of FIFA, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar has distorted the system of competition. In the middle, complaints of slavery, death and lack of working conditions already open a question mark about the future.

The slavery situation experienced by the workers who build the infrastructure necessary to run the Qatar World Cup has not been of much importance in the media over the past decade. However, the complaints have been repeated since 2010 when the Asian country was chosen as the venue for the World Cup. In recent weeks, after years, the possibility of a boycott by certain European countries has started to turn. The staging of the Norwegian national team, With his beast Erling Haaland calling for human rights, the phrases of the German captains and other teams, at the very least, light up the scene. The peculiar situation is that, according to one estimate, since the start of preparations for the World Cup in Qatar in 2010, 6,500 workers have already died who have gone to build infrastructure for the competition.

The constructions that a World Cup needs are not just stadiums or mergers. The necessary infrastructure ranges from airports, routes, hotels and public transport. During the last decade, Qatar embarked on this pharaonic construction program which even included the construction of a new city: Lusail. In an Amnesty International report published in 2016, the organization revealed that the cheap labor came from Nepal, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. There were also the Philippines and Kenya.

The need was the special situation that companies recruiting take advantage of. Dozens of companies have charged a commission of between $ 500 and $ 4,300 just to get a job. The mechanism is as follows: a worker “invests” this money in order to be able to go to work in Qatar, including a visa, and therefore to have a salary until the investment is recovered and the profit is made. Workers are left at the mercy of their employers.

In the same report, Amnesty International revealed that workers, among others, have their passports confiscated and, in addition, to leave the country they need a permit from the company that hires them. The workers are taken to “camps” so that from there they can go to construction sites. Beginning of March 2021, The Guardian newspaper developed this report and published that the classifications of these deaths in 70% were considered “natural”. However, the World Labor Organization has published a report in which it describes the climatic conditions faced by workers. Among them there was extreme heat.

In contrast, FIFA – which boasts among other things the remarkable figure of having more members than its organization than the UN itself – indicated that only 37 deaths are “linked” to the construction of the stadium. However, they were also classified as “non-work-related deaths”.

In these situations, it should be remembered that the choice of Qatar as the future venue for the World Cup was the starting point of what the FIFA Gate investigation meant. In this scandal, the main investigation in the United States pointed out that, for example, the Argentinian leader of the AFA at the time of the election of seats, Julio Humberto Grondona, had received a bribe not only to vote , but also to work. in favor of the Asian country. Less than 600 days before the World Cup, the first in history to be played in November, the first pressures are starting to appear so that at least its achievement is called into question.