{"id":225015,"date":"2022-12-05T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2022-12-05T12:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=225015"},"modified":"2022-12-03T05:22:50","modified_gmt":"2022-12-03T05:22:50","slug":"qatars-world-cup-is-a-lavish-exercise-in-sportswashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/12\/qatars-world-cup-is-a-lavish-exercise-in-sportswashing\/","title":{"rendered":"Qatar\u2019s World Cup Is a Lavish Exercise in Sportswashing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

1 Dec 2022 – <\/em>Regardless of whether one calls it soccer or football, the FIFA<\/span> Men\u2019s World Cup tournament underway in Qatar may be the most-watched sporting event ever. It\u2019s predicted that by the time the month-long tournament ends on December 18th, half the world\u2019s population will have tuned in. One million fans are expected in this small, scorching desert peninsula in the Persian Gulf to watch teams from 32 nations compete. Since FIFA<\/span> awarded Qatar the games back in 2010 (in a process suffused with corruption and bribery), planning and construction has occurred at a frantic pace. Seven massive new stadiums, a metro system, new roads, 100 hotels, over 100 practice fields and more have been built, almost exclusively by migrant laborers who work in Qatar with virtually no rights. The torturous, extraordinarily hot working conditions endured by workers are believed to have caused thousands deaths.<\/p>\n

Abdullah Al-Arian, history professor at Georgetown University in Qatar said on the Democracy Now!<\/a> news hour, \u201cFootball goes back to the colonial days, when it was being introduced by British and French officials as a way of instilling discipline and \u2018civilizing\u2019 the local populations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Qatar\u2019s treatment of foreign workers is another consequence of colonialism. The \u201ckafala system,\u201d Al-Arian explained, \u201cwas the kind of migrant labor governance structure\u2026put in place initially by British colonial authorities at a time when they were trying to preserve their own interests.\u201d He went on, \u201cThey wanted to tie all of the migrant workers to their sponsorship, meaning that their employer would dictate the extent to which they would be allowed in the country, for how long. Things like changing jobs were not permitted without the permission of the employer. There was no real protection over things like a minimum wage or even safety considerations\u2026this was a system that was then inherited by all of the independent states in the Gulf.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A worker formerly employed on a project to fit out offices in the Al Bidda Tower who now lives and works illegally after the company that employed him collapsed and failed to pay him for a year.
Photograph: Pete Pattisson for the Guardian<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2012, while in Qatar covering COP18, that year\u2019s United Nations climate summit, Democracy Now! interviewed<\/a> Devendra Dhungana, a Nepalese journalist investigating working conditions for migrant workers from Nepal. World Cup construction had just begun.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe visited the labor camps, and what we saw was just unbelievable,\u201d Dhungana said. \u201cMore than 50 migrant workers are living in the 12 to 14 rooms with very little facilities\u2014no running water, no AC in several places. They are living in very squalid conditions\u202650 people have to queue up in the morning to use one toilet.\u201d He concluded, \u201cWe expect to see more people will die working in the stadiums than the number of players playing in the Qatari stadiums.\u201d<\/p>\n

Geopolitics have also impacted the games. Qatar is an absolute monarchy. Like many dictatorships around the world, it enjoys the full backing of the U.S. government. Centcom, the U.S. military\u2019s Central Command, has its forward headquarters just miles outside of Doha, at the Al Udeid Air Base. It\u2019s the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, and only about 150 miles from Iran.<\/p>\n

A U.S. soccer team social media post depicted the Iranian flag without the emblem of the Islamic Republic, to show solidarity with women protesters in Iran. Iran responded by demanding the U.S. be ejected from the World Cup. Meanwhile, the Iranian team itself took a courageous stand, refusing to sing their national anthem, ostensibly in solidarity with the protesters back home.<\/p>\n

The international athletes and tourists flooding Qatar have also come into direct conflict with the ruling monarchy\u2019s deep-seated intolerance. Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar. On the eve of the games, FIFA<\/span> banned \u201cOne Love\u201d rainbow armbands that several teams were promising to wear to express solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re definitely seeing sportswashing, where political leaders are using the sports event to try to deflect attention from human rights,\u201d Jules Boykoff, a former U.S. Olympic and professional soccer player said on Democracy Now!.<\/a> \u201cFIFA should\u2026give some money to migrant workers and their families who haven\u2019t been paid properly. Some of them have died, and they haven\u2019t received proper compensation. So, if you win the World Cup, your team gets $42 million. That should be the bare minimum that should be then thrown in the direction of these families who have suffered so greatly because of the World Cup, that is giving so many people around the world so much joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a recent Op-Ed on the World Cup published in the New York Times, Abdullah Al-Arian quoted Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote,\u201dsoccer is the field of expression permitted by secret understanding between ruler and ruled in the prison cell of Arab democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soccer is called \u201cthe Beautiful Game,\u201d but the 2022 World Cup should serve as a reminder that for many in the world, the fight for human rights, workers rights and equality is not a game. It is deadly serious.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Dec 2022 – Qatar\u2019s treatment of foreign workers is a consequence of colonialism: The \u201ckafala\u201d system was the migrant labor governance structure put in place initially by British colonizers to preserve their own interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":65754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[223],"tags":[550,2745,610,2325,1801,1693],"class_list":["post-225015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","tag-corruption","tag-fifa","tag-inequality","tag-migrant-workers","tag-qatar","tag-soccer-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}