Worker Discrimination At Asian Cup in Qatar

Empty seats, but still no room for migrant workers?

The majority of Qatar's immigrants, making up an estimated 70 per cent of the country's one million population (according to this piece at the Canadian site Maclean's), come from South Asia and work in either the domestic or the construction industries. The website reports that many workers are paid $2,200 per annum for 12-hour days, and quotes Human Rights Watch researcher Samer Muscati as saying that their working conditions are the equivalent of "forced labour".

Is there any reason to believe that the oil-wealthy nation will improve those conditions for workers employed to build the eight World Cup stadia? Perhaps, with some pressure from FIFA. Georgetown University, the Washington DC-based educational establishment with a campus in Doha, lobbied for better working conditions on its newest construction site in the Qatari capital, so there's already a precedent for football's governing body to follow.

There's a telling anecdote from a Qatar resident in the comments section to the piece about how he went to a game between Australia and South Korea at the current Asian Confederations Cup and saw five Nepalese migrant workers refused admission to the stadium on the grounds that there were only tickets left for the stadium's Family Section:

"My friend and I were in the 'family' section, where there were several groups of Arab and Western men. Our supposed 'family section' was not a family section at all. It was a general seating area. So, why on earth would five workers be denied entry into a stadium with 10,000 empty seats? Because that is the way things work in Qatar. That is the way it is in malls, in parks and anywhere else that labourers are not wanted. These young men are the very ones who will be building the stadiums, the roads, the infrastructure needed to put on the World Cup when Qatar hosts it in 2022. But, will these workers be allowed into the stadiums? They work long hours in brutal conditions, live in squalid conditions and tend to earn very low wages. Often, their passports are taken away, and they are subject to a system that essentially makes them slaves to their employers."

So, once FIFA has been assured that slave labour working conditions have been eradicated, there's a second Fair Play issue for it to work on the next time it sends a delegation to Qatar. If football is the great leveller that it claims, no one should be turned away at the gates on the grounds of race and class. And especially not at a FIFA-sanctioned tournament like the AFC.

Russia 2018: Expect To Be Checked, Wherever You Go

Grozny, 1995: key component to a Russian cycle of violence

The deadly terrorist bomb attack on Moscow’s Domodedovo airport this week prompted domestic reactions as predictable as the rise of the morning sun. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised that state retribution was “inevitable”.  The head of the Russian Orthodox Church denounced it as “the horrifying scowl of sin”. And President Dimitry Medvedev pledged stronger security measures ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2018 World Cup.

Let’s take Putin first. It seems no politician is capable of reacting to a terrorist attack without the tedious tough guy stance. We’ll crush them. We’ll hit back. An examination of the reasons why a state is being attacked from within is never in question. They can only be vicious, murdering enemies acting in isolation as crazed killers, and they must be wiped out. Never mind that as long as you stay on the cycle of violence, there’s no getting off. Never mind the context of Russian aggression that started by razing the city of Grozny to the ground in the first Russia-Chechen war in the mid-1990s, when Russian forces committed human rights atrocities and thousands of civilians (including many ethnic Russians) were killed in ground and air attacks, and that continues today with the Kremlin-backed Chechen leader and human rights violator Ramzan Kadyrov.

Then there’s the ROC’s Patriarch Kirill I, with the obligatory smoldering rhetoric from the safety of a pulpit. He has God on his side, and therefore truth and righteousness too. Go on, denounce violence, it’s easy. We can do it too, because obviously a bomb planted in an airport that kills 35 innocent people and injures a further 150 is abhorrent and cowardly. But how do we stop it, moral leader? Any answers?

Finally Medvedev, after blaming poor security and sacking a few people, promises stronger measures in the future. People in the US and western Europe are familiar with what this means - tiresome, lengthy, inconvenient checks for millions of travellers, at huge expense, with absolutely no guarantee that different kinds of future terrorist attack will be prevented as long as we’re busy promoting democracy by dropping bombs on Muslim countries.

All the clampdowns, violent retaliation, the verbose posturing, and the uniformed patrols and checkpoints won’t change a thing. These terror attacks are one consequence of past human rights abuses, and the only way to prevent them in the long term comes through non-repressive political solutions that are satisfactory to all parties – an ABC historical lesson you’d think a simpleton could heed. We wonder exactly how little attention FIFA ExCom members paid to recent Russian history when they awarded the 2018 tournament. Was it barely none, or absolutely none at all?

Personally, we wouldn’t advise going near the 2018 World Cup until an independent Chechnya is governed without Russian interference, and people of non-Russian origin can walk freely around Moscow without fear of being lynched by nationalist thugs. In the current climate, those are distant prospects.

Human Rights Watch 2011 Report – Russia

The following are extracts from the Human Rights Watch 2011 World Report that pertain to the 2018 host of the FIFA World Cup, Russia. The full HRW report on Russia can be read here.

Olympic spirit - workers' rights abused, property seized

“In 2010 Russia demonstrated increased openness to international cooperation on human rights, but the overall human rights climate in the country remained deeply negative. President Dmitry Medvedev's rhetorical commitments to human rights and the rule of law have not been backed by concrete steps to support civil society. The year 2010 saw new attacks on human rights defenders, and the perpetrators of brazen murders in the previous year remained unpunished.”

“The Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus republics remained active in 2010. In countering it, law enforcement and security agencies continued to commit grave violations of fundamental human rights, such as torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings.”

“To date the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has issued more than 150 judgments holding Russia responsible for grave human rights violations in Chechnya. Russia continues to pay the required monetary compensation to victims but fails to meaningfully implement the core of the judgments, in particular conducting effective investigations and holding perpetrators accountable. The Russian authorities have also failed to take sufficient measures to prevent the recurrence of similar abuses and new complaints are lodged with the ECtHR every year. The failure to fully implement the court's judgments denies justice to the victims and fuels the climate of impunity in Chechnya.”

Human Rights Watch 2011 Report – Brazil

More required reading at FIFA HQ

The following are extracts from the Human Rights Watch 2011 World Report that pertain to the 2014 host of the FIFA World Cup, Brazil. The full HRW report on Brazil can be read here.

“Most of Brazil's metropolitan areas are plagued by widespread violence perpetrated by criminal gangs and abusive police. Violence especially impacts low-income communities. There are more than 40,000 intentional homicides in Brazil every year. In Rio de Janeiro hundreds of low-income communities are occupied and controlled by drug gangs, who routinely engage in violent crime and extortion.”

“Police abuse, including extrajudicial execution, is a chronic problem. According to official data, police were responsible for 505 killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro alone in the first six months of 2010. This amounts to roughly three police killings per day, or at least one police killing for every six ‘regular’ intentional homicides.”

Naked Flesh Disturbs Desires Of Russian Archpriest

Some ideally dressed Russian women, yesterday

In any country where human rights are under attack, you can always be sure that some religious authority will be waiting in the wings to exploit the climate of suppression and take the chance to tell people how they should be leading their lives. In the country of the 2018 World Cup, this has come in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Archpriest Vsevolod “Charlie” Chaplin, who has posited the idea of an all-Russian dress code to get women to cover up their legs.

Translation: every time I get a hard-on, I fear that God is watching and I can’t cope with it. Chaplin has publicly slammed women who leave the house “painted like a clown”, who “confuse the street with striptease” (yes, we’ve all done it – stopped half way across the road and simply cast off all our clothes), and who wear mini-skirts that “can provoke not only a man from the Caucasus… but a Russian man as well”. If she happens to enjoy a drink and then get raped, well then “she is all the more at fault”. So, a lovely chap who ticks all our boxes by managing to be egregiously sexist and racist at the same time as wanting to deprive others of their rights because he fears his own body’s reaction to naked flesh. Perhaps he should stay home locked in a dark cupboard, for everybody’s sake.

There’s more. According to Chaplin, reportedly a “close associate” of Patriarch Kirill I (another big shot in the ROC, who also supports Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko), provocatively clothed women cause “short-term marriages, which are immediately followed by rat-like divorces, to the destruction of children’s lives, to solitude and madness, to life-catastrophe.” Damn those wenches and their long shapely legs! Not to mention those divorce-loving rats (when will rodents understand the sanctimony of marriage?). But the Arschpriest has an answer: save society, and no doubt the world, by refusing to admit scantily clad dames to public venues. And men with tracksuits too, but that sounds like a separate issue.

This all sounds familiar. Now let me think, where else do religious strictures dictate to women what they should wear and forbid them to show their lust-igniting skin in public? Mr. Chaplin, your VIP box tickets for the 2022 World Cup final in Doha are secure. And may you enjoy a stroll around town afterwards without the embarrassment of a bonk-on sprouting beneath your godly robes.

Quote Of The Day - Sham Of Middle East Civil Rights Forum

The people's will - coming soon to Qatar

" 'The Arab foreign ministers,' as one prominent figure in the democracy-promotion world said to me, 'have learned from these meetings exactly how to thwart democracy, not how to help it.' The sessions have taught local leaders the dangers of Western-supported and genuinely autonomous NGOs, and regimes across the Arab world have cracked down on them. Many human rights groups have been hounded out of existence; only the most reliably docile ones are permitted inside the forum’s doors."

James Traub writing in Foreign Policy Magazine on last week's Forum for the Future in Doha. The Forum was the initiative of George W Bush and the G-8 nations, and was founded in 2004 with the aim of promoting democracy and civil rights in the Middle East and North Africa, but Traub now says it achieves the exact opposite. He calls for the Forum's abolition and for the United States to align itself "more clearly and convincingly on the side of those who clamour for change".

Quote of the Week - Arch Puddington, Freedom House

"Questions about freedom? Sorry, can't hear ya!"

"It is often observed that a government that mistreats its people also fears its people. But authoritarian regimes will have a much freer hand to silence their domestic critics if there is no resistance from the outside world. Indeed, if the world’s democracies fail to unite and speak out in defense of their own values, despots will continue to gain momentum." Arch Puddington (great name, it has to be said), Director of Research at Washington, DC-based Freedom House, upon publication of the body's report published Thursday outlining decreased levels of freedom for the fifth successive year in the world's nations.

The organisation also highlighted Russia as one of "the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes [acting] with increased brazenness in 2010.  Russia’s leadership showed blatant disregard for judicial independence in its handling of, among other cases, the sentencing of regime critic and former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky after a trial that was widely considered fraudulent." Not to mention ongoing unsolved attacks and assassinations targeting investigative journalists and human rights advocates, and almost total state control of the media.

Blatter Manages To Speak Sense On Human Rights In Qatar

Blatter - has he actually started thinking?

This is going to sound like the kind of thing we’d pretend FIFA President Sepp Blatter uttered in the name of satire. But he actually said it, to CNN. Yes, Blatter managed to address the issue of human rights without shoving his toes in his own maw. On the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, he said: “If the principles of human rights will not be respected, then this could be a problem. We will push Qatar to make sure the World Cup will be played in such conditions that other World Cups have been played and that human rights are respected.”

Let’s hope he’s not talking about Argentina 78. And naturally, the Scepticism Radar at WCHR world headquarters began to howl like a distressed mongoose. Is this just placatory PR to make up for his sad remarks about homosexuals abstaining from sexual activity while at the WC, and his admission to the Zürich-based Sonntagszeitung that he hadn’t even known that homosexuality was illegal in the Gulf state? Or has Sepp been subscribing to our feed and belatedly realised that the governing body’s mission could become more noble than merely making cash from man’s ability to kick a round ball?

‘Tired’ England Ditches Thai Bribe

Joke team to skip joke fixture

The English Football Association has officially cancelled its national team’s friendly in Thailand this June because it has belatedly realised that its players need to rest, apparently. In fact the game was doomed the moment that England failed to win hosting rights to the 2018 World Cup, and they realised that their pledge to play in Thailand had failed to secure the vote of Thailand FA President and FIFA ExCom member Worawi Makudi.

This was one of multiple dubious promises (otherwise known as ‘bribes’) made during the farcical World Cup bidding process in the run-up to last month’s announcements in Zürich, and we cite it here because it’s just one blatant example illustrating the urgent need for outright reform of both FIFA and the way it awards its tournaments. Without a strong ethical code of its own, FIFA has no right to demand strong ethical practices in its host nations. And ultimately, that is the only way that the self-proclaimed world game can aim to play a worthwhile global role and genuinely become ‘more than a game.’ (And that’s why, in case you’re wondering, we’re bothering with this micro-protest in blog form. Yes, we’re starting at the bottom because, as with FIFA’s morals, the only way from here is up.)

Russia’s Crowd Problem

Hint to players - don't get too close to the crowd.

Vast crowds of people will be a common phenomenon at the 2018 World Cup, but Russia is still having problems dealing with even the smallest of gatherings. So much, in fact, that it’s been jailing opposition leaders who have merely been gathering to exercise their lawful right to assemble.  

One of its more prominent opposition figures, Boris Nemtsov, yesterday filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights over his arrest on New Year’s Eve at an opposition rally, and the 15-day prison sentence he was slapped with. His attorney, Olga Mihkailova, said they’d filed the appeal with the ECHR because his appeal with the Moscow courts had still not been reviewed.

Quote of the Week – Prince Ali On Women’s Football

Women with tools of empowerment

“I think enhancing [women’s football] is also a great socio-economic tool to empower them and I want to work very hard on that and create professional leagues for women in Asia and hopefully get more places at the World Cup for women’s football.”

Prince Ali Bin al-Hussein of Jordan, newly elected Asian Football Confederation vice president and FIFA Executive Committee member, in an interview with World Football Insider.  He also acknowledged that “in Asia we’re very different cultures, very different backgrounds, but still there can be some cultural taboos about women’s football.” Still, with all sincerity, we wish you the very best of luck, and hope that a FIFA ExCom member talking sense won't get him into too much trouble. Though it's not hard to imagine some of his colleagues whispering, "It's understandable, he's new. Now someone take him to one side and quietly explain what we don't do here..."

Qatari Gay Rights - A Twit Twitters

Sheikh's required reading

The Chairman of the Qatar 2022 World Cup Bid Committee, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Hamad Al Thani, last month let his twitter followers know in unambiguous terms what he thinks of people who object to the host country’s laws banning homosexuality.

“It’s interesting that all of a sudden everyone who was anti-qatar2022 is now a gay rights activist. Glass houses, anyone?” he twote on December 14th. It’s interesting that anyone who expresses themselves on twitter seems to wind up sounding like a chat room bigot. Glass skulls, anyone?

On the same day he saw fit to further enlighten the world with his playground analysis. “People should stop using the topic of homosexuality as a scapegoat for their general (and discriminatory) attitude towards Qatar and the ME.” Yes, far better to use the topic to criminalise innocent people for their sexuality.

Quote of the Day - Russia going totalitarian

Those dictatorship days ain't over

"It's becoming clear we are on the way back to the 1940s and a totalitarian state. How can one sit and watch quietly as it happens?" Marina Rozumovskaya, a Russian school teacher, quoted in The Washington Post while demonstrating in Moscow to prove her legal right to protest, and holding a sign that read "Freedom to political prisoners". 

Rozumovskaya was taking part in one of three simultaneous protests following the arrest of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was arrested Sunday upon leaving a legal demonstration in support of the right to assemble. He was sentenced to 15 days in prison, allegedly for disobeying police officers.

The school teacher avoided arrest, but 19 fellow protestors were not so lucky. "I am not a politician, just a teacher," she added, "I want my pupils to live in a civilized country. I don't want them turning into people without honor and conscience."

World Cup nostalgists will remember that the 1978 competition in Argentina also took place in a totalitarian state. Presumably FIFA is as unruffled about that possibility in 2018 as it was for the tournament  33 years ago.

Kaiser Steps Up To Protest Against Iran

Kaiser Franz - political with a small 'p'

FIFA Executive Committee member Franz Beckenbauer was one of 100 prominent Germans who signed an open letter to the Iranian government appealing for the release of two German journalists arrested in October for interviewing the son of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.

The Kaiser’s not exactly chaining himself to the embassy gates, and he’s due to step down from the Committee soon in any case, and no doubt he is signing the letter as an individual first, and as a member of the FIFA ExCom not at all. Nonetheless, let’s be thankful for the tiniest sign: it is possible for a FIFA functionary to express a view on a human rights issue that doesn’t relate directly to football.

Educating Sepp Blatter

FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s weekend interview with the Swiss Sonntagszeitung was headlined by his announcement that FIFA will form an “independent” anti-corruption committee. So, the world’s football governing body has decided to slap on a condom several hours after completing full sexual intercourse.

Blatter - praying for enlightenment

In classic FIFA fashion, this initiative comes not from any sense that tackling corruption is the right thing to do. Rather, in Blatter’s words, its purpose would be “to strengthen our credibility and re-define our image in the realm of public relations.” For these must always be the prime motivations behind any moral undertaking.

The rest of the interview was the usual self-aggrandizing cant about how he had to struggle to survive from the moment he was born, how he went to a monastery in the Swiss town of Einsiedeln to pray for a successful World Cup in South Africa, and how the marching band in Visp – a ski resort where he owns a flat – apparently is prone to playing a Sepp Blatter March when they parade beneath his balcony (we’d be happy to provide some lyrics for their next procession). He also admitted to having “few genuine friends”, and aired his standard lament about “obsessive” journalists who insist on bringing up FIFA’s long history of corruption. Shame on them.