FIFA protests at dawn
6500 leather balls against “bloody games” in Qatar
4/1/2022 7:43 am
Protests break out early on the day of the World Cup draw in Doha. A German artist unloads 6,500 balls in front of the FIFA headquarters in Zurich and warns of “bloody games” in Qatar. Even before that, President Gianni Infantino was criticized. He is a “propaganda spokesman,” says a human rights activist.
The day of the World Cup draw for the controversial 2022 World Cup in Qatar began with a spectacular protest. At dawn, the German artist Volker-Johannes Trieb unloaded 6,500 footballs filled with sand in front of the headquarters of the world football association FIFA in Zurich. “Conscience, you are a stain of shame” was denounced on the leather balls, which are said to symbolize the 6,500 workers who died on Qatar’s World Cup construction sites.
The quote, taken from the work of Truus Menger-Overstegen, a Dutch resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation, is intended to refer to FIFA’s “ignorance and indifference” in the face of the human rights violations in the Emirate denounced by numerous organizations, the artist said in the run-up to the campaign with.
“Football is played in Qatar? It is played with human lives and games of this kind are unacceptable,” explained the artist: “They will be bloody games. Many thousands of people died in Qatar building stadiums at the expense of the World Cup. They treated like slaves and died of heat, exhaustion, or lack of security.”
FIFA, led by President Gianni Infantino, who currently lives in Qatar, has recently been heavily criticized for its loyalty to the desert state. Infantino behaves “like a propaganda show spokesman for the Qatar government,” said Wenzel Michalski, the Germany director of the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, on Sky this week.
Silence at Congress
Michalski accused FIFA of inaction with regard to the World Cup hosts. “We have never heard from FIFA that they have publicly denounced the human rights situation in Qatar,” he said. Something that also occupies performance artist Trieb. “Modern slavery has taken people from countries like India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Nepal from their lives and their families,” he said. “Some would call it murder. FIFA doesn’t intervene.”
The critics did not remain silent at the FIFA Congress in Doha either, but were then silenced. The Norwegian association president Lise Klaveness accused the world association of awarding the tournament under “unacceptable circumstances and with unacceptable consequences”. FIFA must take care of the “injured migrants at the World Cup construction sites, for the families of the workers who died (in Qatar, d. Red),” said the 40-year-old in her speech: “There is no place for hosts who don’t ensure the safety of World Cup workers. No place for leaders who do not host women’s games. No place for organizers who do not ensure safety and respect for the LGBQT+ movement.”
After the Honduran representative replied that the congress was about football, World Cup organizer Hassan Al-Thawadi said angrily: “Madam President comes to our country and has not tried to contact us and has not tried to enter into a dialogue start.” He then referred to the progress attested by international trade unions.
Qatar has been under massive criticism for years. Media reports of thousands of dead workers in connection with preparations for the 2022 Winter World Cup have sparked heated debates in recent years, particularly in the western world, about the price football is willing to pay to host a tournament.
Dilemma for Germany
At the center of the debate is the so-called kafala system, which virtually robs workers from abroad of all their rights. In contrast to other countries in the region, the system is officially abolished in Qatar. However, human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International continue to denounce the dependency of guest workers and have reported on the serious human rights violations in Qatar in recent weeks and months.
FIFA points to the great power of football to bring about change and officially relies on change through dialogue and embrace. The world tournament sheds a spotlight on the human rights situation in Qatar and thereby enables an improvement in human rights. Critics also point out that the spotlight will go out after the tournament.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has changed Germany’s perspective on the emirate once again in recent weeks. Qatar should be a building block of the energy transition and end Germany’s dependence on Russian gas.
“Germany can no longer make the same mistakes and remain silent about human rights violations when it comes to energy – or only speak up half-heartedly. In the case of Russia, that really backfired,” Michalski, the director of Human Rights Watch Germany, said in the said last week in an interview with ntv.de as a reaction to the trip to the emirate by Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck.