The treatment of Nepalese migrant workers building the World Cup 2022 venues in Qatar has come into focus in the wake of last month’s devastating earthquake, the Daily Beast reported today. The Nepalese workers were forbidden to return home for funerals of relatives.
As reported by The Guardian, Tek Bahadur Gurung, Nepal’s labor minister, is not only making this latest human rights violation public, he’s demanding accountability from both Qatar and FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, which is being indicted by the U.S. on 147 charges of corruption and money laundering.
“After the earthquake of 25 April, we requested all companies in Qatar to give their Nepalese workers special leave and pay for their air fare home. While workers in some sectors of the economy have been given this, those on World Cup construction sites are not being allowed to leave because of the pressure to complete projects on time,” Gurung said. “They have lost relatives and their homes and are enduring very difficult conditions in Qatar. This is adding to their suffering,” …
Gurung knows all too well that “nothing will change for migrant workers until FIFA and its rich sponsors insist on it. These are the people who are bringing the World Cup to Qatar. But we are a small, poor country and these powerful organisations are not interested in listening to us.”
Despite talks between FIFA president Sepp Blatter and Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, who promised better conditions for the laborers, The Daily Beast noted that an Amnesty International report published shortly thereafter revealed, “that for the 1.5 million laborers ‘little has changed in law, policy and practice’ in Qatar.”
In addition to the scandal over the treatment of Nepalese migrants, the United States just announced the arrests of seven top FIFA officials last night. Last week, FIFA said that it would investigate the arrests of a BBC team that had come to Qatar to investigate conditions of the migrant workers.
Later this week, Blatter will stand for re-election to his fifth term as president of FIFA. If FIFA doesn’t have too much else to occupy it, it will also consider a motion from Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Football Association, to suspend Israel from the organization. As assistant editor Aiden Pink writes in Could Israel Get Booted Out of Soccer?, published in the June 2015 of The Tower Magazine:
On May 29, a 79-year-old Swiss bureaucrat named Sepp Blatter will run for his fifth term as president of FIFA, the governing body of world soccer. Having led the organization that oversees the world’s most popular game since 1998—an organization that has long been accused of rampant corruption, retrograde sexism, and, in the case of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, enabling slavery—Blatter is a man who, like the sport he runs, brings out the passion in people. “He may well be the most successful non-homicidal dictator of the past century,” said Marina Hyde of The Guardian. “Sepp Blatter saying ‘I stand by my work’ is like a puppy standing by the work it did after being left alone in the house for the first time,” said John Oliver of HBO. But the people who actually participate in his elections have an entirely different, though no less passionate, view. To them, Blatter is akin to Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela, and Winston Churchill—“Why is he different from these other men?” asked Osiris Guzman, the president of the Dominican Football Federation. Guzman once served a 30-day suspension from FIFA over allegations of vote-buying connected to an election that determined that the best possible location for a month-long soccer tournament was a desert nation where temperatures frequently hit 120 degrees and homosexuality is punishable by death—not to worry, though, said Blatter, because gay soccer fans should just “refrain from any sexual activities.”
But Blatter’s likely reelection is surprisingly not the most shameful issue on the agenda of the 65th FIFA Congress. That would be item 15.1: the proposal by the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) to suspend the Israel Football Association (IFA) from FIFA. The PFA is taking this action because, in the words of PFA president Jibril Rajoub, who is also a member of the Central Committee of the West Bank’s ruling Fatah party, “It is clear that the [IFA] is not willing to recognize the PFA as a federation with equal rights and obligations, just as they continue to violate their commitments made before FIFA. We are therefore determined to continue our path to suspend the [IFA] during the next FIFA Congress.”
[Photo: ESPN UK / YouTube ]