While media and public attention had shifted to the game, the organizers of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar strangely chose to reopen one of the most controversial cases before the start of the tournament: the number of migrant workers who lost their lives on the construction sites of this World Cup. Tuesday, November 29, during an interview with the British journalist Piers Morgan, Hassan Al-Thawadi, secretary general of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy (SC), the body in charge of the construction of the eight stadiums of the competition, evaluated this number “between 400 and 500”.
This is the first time that a Qatari official has provided an estimate of deaths covering all the infrastructure built in preparation for the World Cup, that is to say not only the stadiums, but also the means of transport, such as the Doha metro, road infrastructure, hotels, etc.
World Cup boss Hassan Al-Thawadi tells Piers Morgan 400-500 migrant workers have died as a result of work done on p… https://t.co/vFV84oyOKP
Until then, the authorities of the emirate were content to say that 40 immigrants assigned to the construction of stadiums had died, including only three in the exercise of their work.
“Thousands of dead”
With stadium workers making up just 2% of the foreign workforce in Qatar, the SC figures have always left human rights organizations perplexed. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which had access to the death records of the consulates of the main states from which the workforce in Qatar originated and which carried out field investigations, both in these countries and in the Gulf emirate, believe that the human cost of the competition is rather in “thousands of dead”.
During the interview, Piers Morgan asks his guest: “What is the realistic, honest total of migrant workers who died from the work they were doing for the World Cup? » A question that Hassan Al-Thawadi answers: “The estimate is around 400, between 400 and 500. I don’t have the exact number. This is something that is being discussed. »
But no sooner had the British journalist posted that segment of the interview on Twitter than the SC issued a statement implying that his boss’ tongue had split and that he didn’t mean what he said. . The text states that the range of “400-500” to be related to “to national statistics for the period 2014-2020, relating to work-related deaths (414), in all sectors and of all nationalities”.
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