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DOHA, Qatar – The roads here can be impervious to GPS navigation. Drive around the city, and the green line on the screen will begin to interlace in useless forms. The robot's voice will begin to contradict itself.
Qatar has evolved this way, to some extent, for more than two decades, since a gas boom has transformed the fortunes of the nation. It has become denser, bigger and more unrecognizable (to humans and machines) from one day to the next. But in recent years, this process has accelerated at breakneck speed as the country prepares to host the next World Cup football.
When this summer's tournament ends Sunday in Russia, it will be Qatar's turn. For the next four years, this country will have the full attention of the global football community. And in 2022, this country of 2.6 million people will open its doors to 1.5 million international visitors expected.
So questions arose: how much more will the country transform? Until where will Qatari society bend to welcome guests with some expectations of how a World Cup looks and feels? Up to what point will the country tackle the problems – especially those concerning human rights – that have shaken the project of external criticism and doubts from the moment Qatar obtained the welcome rights eight years ago?
Some do not have it. Some may never be.
Meanwhile, Qatar continues to grow. Skyscrapers, shopping centers and shiny stadiums rise. Miles of roads and new public transport lines appear. Hundreds of thousands of imported workers are installing. Trees and grass shoots – in the desert.
"Every day, something changes," said Mohamed Ahmed, director of Khalifa International Stadium. "It's like the whole country is getting ready for something big."
The sprinklers turned and sprayed the water in a steady and hot wind. Most of the water seemed to evaporate before reaching the ground.
"Two years ago, it was a desert," said Yasser al-Mulla, showing a vast expanse of grass and trees during a visit to may. I had to use a 4×4 to get to the office.
These days, Mr. Mulla is driving his F-Type Jaguar to work, where his role in World Cup preparations has been to monitor the grass. Mr. Mulla manages the nursery that produces turf and trees that will decorate stadiums, training sites and public squares in four years. His team cultivates fields of grass on this desert land, sculpts in sheets, rolls them like carpets and sends them to embellish otherwise sterile areas. The group also collected 10,000 trees from across the country and abroad, feeding them in shady tents.
Plants do not grow easily in Doha, which receives about three inches of rain a year. But the World Cup requires greenery.
On the other side of town, a different group experimented with 12 grass species to concoct the perfect turf for the actual playing surfaces of the tournament. They mix variables – light, soil, water and so on – and roll footballs on test benches, among other tests, to evaluate the results.
"The thing about the grass, it's very complicated," says Carlos Sartoretto manager for Aspire Sports Turf, who runs the project. "And each stage is a microenvironment."
The feeling will particularly ring for this World Cup. From the performance center, you can see Khalifa International Stadium, the first of eight stadiums to be ready for competition. During a recent afternoon, Mr. Ahmed, the director of the stadium, walked into the field with a group of visitors, extended his hands and expired
"Feeling that?", A he said. in the mid-90s, sunlight was oppressive and the playground was discovered, open to all elements. But the air inside was cool. It was an engineering trick, Ahmed said, with cold air coming from below pushing warm air, like water into a bowl
The organizers promised FIFA that the stadiums will be at 72 degrees Fahrenheit during the matches. FIFA moved the tournament to an early November, when the outside temperature can reach the 80s, to escape the scorching heat during the traditional summer window of the World Cup.
Nearly two million foreign workers are in the country, and their lives have been under close scrutiny since Qatar got the hospitality rights in 2010. They are everywhere, including Al Wakrah stadium, where 600 vehicles circulated a recent afternoon, and where 4,000 migrant workers in fluorescent clothing alternately rotated under a punishing sun.
Disturbing, sometimes shocking stories about the country's work landscape continue to emerge: In an annual audit published in February, for example, Impactt, the external controller of organizer compliance, found that some people were working more 72 hours a week in some companies, and the workers of an entrepreneur who had worked for more than 124 consecutive days.
the critics changed their tone even slightly.
Last November, for example, the International Labor Organization, a UN agency, dropped a complaint filed in 2014 over the Qatari government's inability to protect the rights of migrant workers. Qatar has at the same time agreed to conclude a technical cooperation agreement with the agency to further reform its labor landscape.
In April, the labor organization opened a little-supplied office in the West Bay district of Doha. only four employees. The team will reach about 15 people by September
. Such movements have, for some, inspired cautious optimism. The three-year project of the agency to solve some fundamental problems: establish a permanent minimum wage; eliminate the exit visa system that prevents workers from leaving the country without the permission of their employer; and create a free labor market, where workers are not tied to a business. The partnership also includes training for judges, prosecutors, police and inspectors.
"We are at the beginning of our journey," said Houtan Homayounpour, who heads the office, adding that the presence of his team was worthy of optimism. . "We are here.You can not say it about many countries."
Other critics said that they would expect to see tangible results. As Vani Saraswathi, director of projects at Migrant Rights, an organization defending the rights of migrant workers in the Persian Gulf countries, said about Qatar's statements: "They say this since 2014."
She was to be publicly optimistic as she was now a partner of Qatar and she pointed to deep structural concerns in the country, such as limited access to justice for employees, especially those who do not work not in the stadiums.
To pay her employees, she added, employees must file 100 complaints. Saraswathi, who has lived in Qatar from 1999 to 2017, said the biggest problem is that projects commissioned directly by World Cup organizers have been a tiny part of the construction projects in the country. By focusing on the improvements there, she says, she does not consider a bigger problem.
"All that is being built in Qatar, it is the World Cup, roads to hotels". Delivery & Legacy, which is responsible for overseeing the $ 200 billion World Cup infrastructure project, operates inside a glittering silver tower that vaguely resembles to a tornado. It is surrounded by other skyscrapers of assorted colors and unconventional forms that together form the kaleidoscopic horizon of Doha.
In an interview with his office overlooking the Gulf person, Nasser al-Khater, the deputy secretary general of the committee, said: "was very satisfied" with the progress of the work and confident that it would be done in the deadlines provided two years before the tournament. He admitted, for example, that there were still serious labor problems, but he added that Qatar was "light years" away from what it was five years ago and he said that "there is no problem". an air and sea boycott, initiated last year by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on political disputes, had sent the committee scrambling for other material supply chains particularly in India, China and China. Turkey. But he and other 2022 Qatar officials described the experience as positive because it opened the eyes of the committee on what he termed "new areas of opportunity".
Of 2.69 million people, about 300,000 [19659008] are Qatari citizens. The addition of a million foreigners, in the form of football fans, has been difficult to understand for some who have spent their lives in this country.
"We are a minority in our country," said Mr. Khater told Qataris, "so we have experience dealing with this, and we understand that there are going to be people who are not used to our culture, that would not have been here long enough to understand the standards of what is appropriate and what is not. And that is our job of us to ensure that we educate people about our culture as much as possible, and it is our duty and responsibility to make sure that people here are as hospitable as possible. "
Foreign journalists arrested in recent years for "defaming" the country. Qatar sometimes censors the international media. Nevertheless, said Mr Khater, they would be ready for thousands of journalists – many of whom do not focus on football.
"In the last eight years, I can say that the skin of the country is thickened". . "I can say that by 2022, the skin is going to be much thicker, we will have to be much more tolerant."
In Russia, for example, the authorities mostly watched on the other side during the last two months while international fans and residents were partying in the street, drinking (in violation of the law in many cases) and singing and dancing well in the morning hours.
The next World Cup will certainly not look like this, Qatar officials said. Mr Khater said he "could consider" designated consumption zones, but he added that alcohol would be "more restricted" than at previous World Cups. This can be difficult. the World Cup often takes control of the host country with its own energy, and the scale and diversity of crowds can sometimes make it difficult to moderate their behavior, which Qatar 2022 executives have learned first-hand in Russia
Hassan al-Thawadi, Chief of the Supreme Committee said that 250 people from his team had competed at the World Cup this summer to have a glimpse of the course of a tournament, including gambling operations , media procedures and security inside and outside the stadiums. Seeing the large crowds up close, they realized, among other things, that they would need to move the planned fan area to another site, and that their new train system would require more than cars.
Yet, said Mr. Khater, those who think that changing the habits of World Cup fans mean that his country should not host the tournament suffer from a lack of imagination.
"We are modest," he said. "We want people to come and see, yes, you could be a modest person, you could be a conservative country and still be a fun loving country, and you could always play football and you could always welcome a World Cup." 19659009] The 900-year-old city of Moscow will host the World Cup final on Sunday. Lusail, the city that will host the World Cup final in four years, does not really exist yet. A 30-minute drive from the center of Doha, there remains a patchwork of nearly empty towers side by side, with new ones popping up quickly alongside them.
Construction is also continuing in places like West Bay, which may still have the feel of a ghost town. Stray cats roam the empty streets. In buildings that keep the lights on at night, viewers can look and see the vast void. The other towers are simply dark.
The supply far exceeds the demand. But Qatar needed to grow for the World Cup. FIFA requires tournament hosts to have 125,000 hotel rooms. At the time of its bid, Qatar had 30,000. It is building hotels and will also use cruise ships and desert campgrounds to supplement the demand for beds.
Experts say that the World Cup is a central element of a plan aimed not only at physically developing the country, but also the recognition of the name on the world stage.
After eight years of waiting, the World Cup projector, the microscope, will be the only one in Qatar, with all that that entails.
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