June 02, 2015

Perimeter ads in World Cup stadiums to show death toll

located:	Qatar
editor:	Murat Suner

Recent criminal charges against senior FIFA officials, which include "money laundering, racketeering, bribery and fraud" shouldn't distract from how much suffering is happening as a "direct result of FIFA's decisions".

The Washington Post is pointing out that human rights advocates had predicted scenarios of death and modern slavery if Qatar started building the infrastructure to host the Cup.

According to a Guardian investigation last year every second day a Nepalese migrant worker was dying on a Qatari construction. The death toll of workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh in Qatar were at 964 in 2012 and 2013. And, these horrible numbers are likely to increase: A report by the International Trade Union Confederation has estimated 1,200 deaths so far, with up to 4,000 additional worker deaths by 2022.

So far 1.2 million migrant workers are in Qatar, another million is to be expected until 2022. According to Sharan Burrow from the ITUC these migrants are essentially slaves.

Against this background the statement from a Qatari spokesman appears as a bad, cynical joke: “The health, safety, wellbeing and dignity of every worker that contributes to staging the 2022 Fifa World Cup is of the utmost importance to our committee and we are committed to ensuring that the event serves as a catalyst toward creating sustainable improvements to the lives of all workers in Qatar.”

With the FIFA, corrupt and reckless as it appears, and a Qatari governance, that obviously doesn't care, modern slavery and dying workers will continue to being accounted as a sort of collateral damage of realising a World Cup.

Shouldn't then perimeter ads in Qatari World Cup stadiums indicating how many lives were lost by building them?

Image: The Guardian / EPA