“You give them pride and dignity”
FIFA boss Infantino taunts workers in Qatar
May 3, 2022, 2:11 p.m
Thousands of immigrant workers die in connection with the construction of the infrastructure and the stadiums for the soccer World Cup. The criticism is loud and insistent. However, FIFA President Gianni Infantino does not reach them. He tries his own story and is proud.
Gianni Infantino believes that the workers on the World Cup construction sites can “take pride in their hard work”. The FIFA President speaks about workers’ welfare at an event in Los Angeles. The suffering of migrant workers in Qatar has been documented in numerous studies. The reported number of deaths in connection with the construction of the stadiums are estimated at between 6,500 and 15,000. But Infantino, who has lived in the emirate for some time, said the construction of the World Cup stadiums and infrastructure would give them “dignity and pride back,” reports the AP news agency.
“One thing we must not forget when we talk about this topic: work, hard work, hard work,” Infantino dodged when asked about compensatory payments from FIFA profits for the families of the migrant workers who died in Qatar. The Swiss then went into his own life story and talked about his parents, who once emigrated from Italy to Switzerland.
“When you get someone to work, even under tough conditions, you also give them pride and dignity. It’s not charity. You don’t give someone something and then make them feel good.” Rather, the migrant workers would have been given the opportunity to build the World Cup stadiums. “It’s also a question of pride,” Infantino said. “To be able to change the conditions for these 1.5 million people. That fills us with pride.”
“FIFA is not the world police”
While Infantino did not dispute the Guardian’s number of 6,500 workers who died, he explained that only three of them died directly on the construction sites. “There could have been 6,000 workers killed elsewhere,” he says. “FIFA is not the world police and is not responsible for everything that happens in the world. But thanks to FIFA and football, we were able to see the status of the 1.5 Accept millions of migrant workers in Qatar.”
They mostly live crammed together in barracks, work under dangerous climatic conditions and sometimes without a break. The labor reforms implemented in Qatar, also under pressure from the international community, were largely aimed at the exploitative “kafala” system in the emirate.
Qatar’s ambassador to Germany, Abudalla Mohammed Al Thani, told ntv.de last summer that the emirate had made “significant progress” in its internal affairs and had “considerably improved the working conditions of many professional groups”. However, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) doubted this in an interview with ntv.de in January 2022. “Four years after the promise to abolish the slavery-like kafala system, the majority of workers continue to suffer from abuse,” said Hiba Zayadin , Senior Golf Expert at HRW.
Critics are not silent
The criticism of the abuse and exploitation of the more than two million migrant workers in Qatar has not stopped, despite attempts at appeasement by the World Cup host country and FIFA. “Eleven years after Qatar won the bid to host the World Cup, four years after pledging to abolish the slavery-like kafala system, the majority of workers continue to suffer abuse,” said Hiba Zayadin, senior Gulf Expert from the human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW), in an interview with ntv.de at the beginning of the year. “The Qatari state continues to largely let down workers.”
In a study from August 2021, Amnesty International showed that 15,021 migrant workers died in Qatar between 2010 and 2019 alone. The report stated that Qatar issues death certificates for migrant workers without examining the cause of death through autopsies. 70 percent of the deaths were not explained. “Death certificates typically report deaths as ‘natural causes’ or ‘cardiac arrest,'” the study said. This would make no connection to working conditions. According to Amnesty International, a well-equipped health system like Qatar’s should be able to determine the cause of death in 99 percent of cases.