THE SOULLESS WORLD CUP — A SPECIAL REPORT ON QATAR 2022
10 migrant building workers packed into a suffocating and stinking room
IT is Qatar National Day, a bank holiday, and down where the rich people live, on the Corniche overlooking Doha’s shimmering West Bay, crowds gather to cheer Qatar’s 39-yearold Emir. Half-an-hour’s drive away, the human cost of the building work going into the state’s extraordinary World Cup build reveals itself; a suffocating, stinking room into which ten Indian men are crammed, with children’s bunks for beds.
The atmosphere in here is what you would expect of a place where five bunks are rigged up, though the fact that food is being stored around the walls doesn’t help.
The Al-Sheehaniya camp, a depressing block of concrete buildings, does not cater for workers, so they cook their own lunches on rudimentary devices in a vast canteen areas. No fridge is visible in the men’s dormitory, where a blind covers a window. With only a small locker for each man, belongings are strewn over the floor.
Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International insist that the true picture of life for workers behind Qatar’s furious 2022 building effort is not to be found at the stadiums — where visiting journalists go looking for evidence — but out of the city. Al-Sheehaniya proves the point.
One block away from the Indians, five Turks occupy another room — with small lockers and upturned buckets for bedside tables. One of them, Abdurrahman, describes himself as a ‘marble master’ who earns £600 a month. He says he doesn’t have any complaints.
One of the scandals among the immigrants who have come to work here is the existence of ‘agents’ who demand money to give them access to this world. Qatar is supposed to have banned the practice but it remains widespread.
Two Pakistanis in another room indicate they have paid agents. Abdurrahman will not be drawn on this subject. ‘Send a WhatsApp [message] later,’ he says, suggesting this is the way he can reply. When the message is sent, nothing comes back. When it is put to a group of Pakistanis at a cafe in the nearby Al-Sheehaniya village — a run-down collection of buildings laid out around a pot-holed road — they confer before one of them speaks. ‘Nothing to say.’
The camp noticeboard is crammed with health and safety notices but Qatar has been unwilling to reveal how many workers have been killed or injured on building sites. When they are western workers, information is established. The Brighton coroner concluded in July that Zac Cox, 40, who died in January 2017 after falling 130 feet from a gantry that collapsed at the Al Khalifa stadium, which hosted yesterday’s Club World Cup final, was a victim of substandard equipment and chaotic working conditions.
Gulf analyst Nicholas McGeehan said this week that the deaths of 385 Indian, Bangladeshi and Nepalese workers in 2012 have never been explained and that Qatari authorities have not responded to repeated requests for figures, nor for years since then.
In his documentary on Qatar 2022, screened last Wednesday, Gary Neville was shocked by the living conditions of workers on the Al Lusail stadium, who told him that they were forced to pay agents.
Liverpool chose not to stay at a Kempinski hotel in Qatar for this week’s tournament after the club’s background checks raised concerns over the company’s track record on workers’ rights.
Though labour laws have improved in Qatar, Amnesty International describe their monitoring here as becoming far more difficult because the state is more aware of their work.
‘Everything related to the World Cup is protected and it’s not easy to get information,’ said a source. ‘Contacts on the ground have become more scared and think their life could be made difficult if they speak and are later identified.’ At Al-Sheehaniya, our conversations are terminated by security staff near the outdoor pot washing station, where workers’ drenched clothes on washing lines are exposed to the rain.
Some drape clothes over air conditioning units in walkways with pools of water. There are demands from security for a Qatar ID card of some kind, so we leave.
The scene, more than the conversation, reveals these men to be utterly dispensable: the 21st century equivalent of navvies.