Posts Tagged ‘absolute monarchy’
Scale on the “abuse of migrant workers” in FIFA selection of World Cup sites?
Posted on: September 23, 2013
Scale on the “abuse of migrant workers” in FIFA selection of World Cup sites?
Should FIFA start a revised procedure for the selection of World Cup locations?
Like, how the government will go about finishing the project and the cost in abuse of workers, humiliations and deprivation of the citizens during the preparation phase… And what the citizens benefit from all the investment and headaches they are subjected to for years?
With the European football association, Uefa, reaching the unavoidable conclusion that you cannot play competitive sport in the 50C heat of a Qatari summer, the way is clear for the international football association Fifa, to break with precedent and make a decision that does not seem corrupt or senseless or both.
Link to video: Qatar: the migrant workers forced to work for no pay in World Cup host country
In hosting the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Fifa is choosing to ignore the abuse of migrant workers.
Nick Cohen published in the Observer this Sept. 21, 2013 :
How many more must die for Qatar’s World Cup?
All being well, the 2022 tournament will be held in the winter. Just one niggling question remains: how many lives will be lost so that the Fifa World Cup™ can live up to its boast that it is the most successful festival of sport on the planet?
“More workers will die building World Cup infrastructure than players will take to the field,” predicts Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.
Even if the teams in Qatar use all their substitutes, she is likely to be right.
Qatar’s absolute monarchy, run by the fabulously rich and extraordinarily secretive Al Thani clan, no more keeps health and safety statistics than it allows free elections.
The Trade Union Confederation has had to count the corpses the hard way.
It found that 83 Indians have died so far this year.
The Gulf statelet was also the graveyard for 119 Nepalese construction workers.
With 202 migrants from other countries dying over the same 9 months, Ms Burrow is able to say with confidence there is at least one death for every day of the year.
The body count can only rise now that Qatar has announced that it will take on 500,000 more migrants, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, to build the stadiums, hotels and roads for 2022.
Not all the fatalities are on construction sites.
The combination of back-breaking work, nonexistent legal protections, intense heat and labour camps without air conditioning allows death to come in many guises.
To give you a taste of its variety, the friends of Chirari Mahato went online to describe how he would work from 6 am to 7 pm. He would return to a hot, non ventilated room he shared with 12 others.
Because Chirari Mahato died in his sleep, rather than on site, his employers would not accept that they had worked him to death.
There are millions of workers like him around the Gulf. When we gawp at the wealth that allows the Qatari royals to buy the Olympic Village and Chelsea Barracks, we miss their plight, and the strangeness of the oil rich states, too.
How to characterize them?
“Absolute monarchy” does not begin to capture a society such as Qatar, where migrants make up 99% of the private sector workforce.
Apartheid South Africa is a useful point of reference. The 225,000 Qatari citizens can form trade unions and strike. The roughly 1.8 million migrants cannot. Sparta also comes to mind. But instead of a warrior elite living off the labour of helots, we have plutocrats and sybarites sustained by faceless armies of disposable migrants.
The official justification for oppression is, as so often, religious.
Migrants and employers are bound by the kafala system – taken from Islamic law on the adoption of children. “Kafala” derives from “to feed”. Nourishment is the last thing the system provides, however.
The system delivers captive labour instead. Migrant workers cannot change jobs without their sponsoring employers’ consent. As Human Rights Watch says “if workers walk out, the employers – the adoptive parents – can say they have absconded and the authorities will arrest them”.
In order to leave Qatar, migrants must obtain an exit visa from their sponsor. This stipulation means that they can be held hostage if they threaten to sue over a breach of contract. Wouldn’t it make a bracing change if the religious leaders we hear condemning free speech as blasphemy so often could find the time to damn this exploitation?
It is not just poor construction workers who suffer.
One might expect that Fifa would have been concerned about the fate of foreign footballers working under kafala contracts. Abdeslam Ouaddou, who once played for Fulham, has warned players not to go near Qatar.
Speaking from experience – Abdeslam Ouaddou played for Qatar SC in the Qatari domestic league – he said that if a player is injured or his form drops, the club can break his contract. If the player goes to lawyers, the club (as “sponsor”) can refuse to let him leave the country until he drops his case.
Ouaddou got out of Qatar after much tortuous negotiation. But French player Zahir Belounis, a former captain of the team Al-Jaish, is trapped in the country with his family and hasn’t been paid for two years. When he went to the international press, he was threatened with defamation proceedings.
After promising the International Trade Union Confederation that it would ensure human rights were respected in Qatar, Fifa tells me that it is “promoting a dialogue” to ensure dignified working conditions. Sharan Burrow’s colleagues say all they hear is PR flam.
It is not just Qatar in 2022.
The corruption and waste around the 2014 World Cup has provoked riots in Brazil.
As for 2018, Putin’s Duma has already restricted the rights of workers preparing the stadiums for the World Cup.
Fifa strikes me as a decadent organisation in the political rather than literary meaning of the word. It is an institution whose behaviour contradicts all of its professed purposes.
If Fifa cared about football, it would not even have thought of staging a tournament in the Qatari summer.
If it cared about footballers, it would take up the case of Belounis.
And if it respected human life, it would say that the kafala system could not govern World Cup contracts.
I don’t know how much longer sports journalists can ignore the abuse Fifa tolerates.
The World Cup is overturning all the cliches. People say that “football is a matter of life or death”, said Bill Shankly. “It’s more important than that.” Shankly was joking. Qatar and Fifa appear to mean it.
Sport is “war minus the shooting“, said Orwell. There may not be any actual shooting in Qatar but workers will die nonetheless.
The quote that ought to haunt all who love football is CLR James‘s paraphrase of Kipling:
“What do they know of cricket that only cricket know?” James was writing about how sport was bound up in the Caribbean with colonialism, race and class.
Anyone writing about the World Cup must also acknowledge that the beautiful game is now bound up with racial privilege, exploitation and the deaths of men, who should not be forgotten so readily.
Note: World Cup procedures are carbon copy of the wishes of extreme liberal capitalism that love to thrive in political systems such as practiced in Qatar, Saudi Arabia…
The “Liberation of Qusayr” was good: Regardless of what Israel is insinuating…
Posted on: June 18, 2013
The “Liberation of Qusayr” was good: Regardless of what Israel is insinuating…
When it comes to Syria, the number one question on the Israeli hawk’s mind today, anxiously debated on the opinion pages of establishment papers, goes something like this:
Everybody knows that both the Free Syrian Army rebels and their Hezbollah antagonists are abominable terrorists, the very antithesis of civilization as we understand it.
And what is a “respectable non-terrorist actor” like Israel to do when these two groups of terrorists are battling one another on their doorstep?
Are all Muslims carrying guns equally considered terrorists, or are there varying degrees of terrorism to be assessed?
Alex Rowell posted this May 21, 2013 on Now: “Israel: Against Hezbollah in Lebanon, with them in Syria”
This cartoon is showing Hezbollah’s missiles targeting Haifa are making a long detour toward the city of Qusayr in Syria first
Terrorism can be so complicated sometimes.
Judging by the reactions of Saudi Arabia absolute monarchy, the totally non-democratic Arab Gulf states and the Mursi of Egypt and…they are pipping the Party of God to the pinnacle of the terrorist pyramid. Take, for instance, Friday’s article in the London Times,
”Islamist fears drive Israel to support Assad survival,”
“Senior Israeli intelligence officials” presented the following argument for the Baath regime’s survival: “Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos, and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there.” The best-case scenario, the officials further opined, was (in Haaretz’ summary) “a weakened but stable Syria under Assad.”
That report prompted a carefully-worded half-denial from Israel Netanyahu PM, who asserted it did “not represent the Israeli government’s position,” but only on the technical grounds that Israel did not in fact have a position on who should govern Syria – hardly an endorsement of the opposition, and indeed an implied suggestion that Assad – along with his Lebanese Islamist allies – were no less preferable candidates than any of the alternatives.
Not that this was the only conciliatory signal Tel Aviv has sent in Assad’s direction of late.
Following the most recent air strike on an alleged Hezbollah weapons convoy near Damascus at the start of this month, Israeli officials rushed to assure Assad they meant no harm to his regime per se. They were just there to prevent terror – if Assad chose to SCUD-missile, cluster-bomb, and air-strike Syrian civilians, well, that was another matter entirely.
Nor does the de facto support for Assad end with merely enabling his war crimes to continue.
Last month, Netanyahu announced Israel reserved the right to physically obstruct the opposition’s armed struggle against the dictatorship by blocking weapons transfers to rebel brigades.
Incompatible as all this may seem with Assad and Hezbollah’s bellowing about confronting the grand Zionist conspiracy, Tel Aviv’s under-the-table camaraderie with Damascus has long been the Middle East’s worst-kept secret.
An excellent explanation of this decades-long relationship appeared recently in Foreign Affairs under the candid title, ‘Israel’s Man in Damascus: Why Jerusalem [sic] Doesn’t Want the Assad Regime to Fall.’
The author, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, runs down the key bullet points: 40 years of calm on the border, fears of Islamism among the opposition, and enduring hopes for a peace treaty that has been on the table since the 1990s. This article concluded that “[Israel] ultimately has little interest in actively hastening the fall of Bashar al-Assad.”
In other words, Israel watches – presumably with some satisfaction – as a kind of umpire in the sky, as Assad and his proxy militias (foremost among them Hezbollah) rain rockets upon rebel “terrorists” just kilometers from Lebanese territory, only stepping in to interrupt the fun when those rockets venture west of the border.
So long as Hezbollah plays by the rules – keeping the guns pointed east rather than south – they’re doing more good than harm in Israel’s eyes, and so they can even be given indirect nudges of assistance.
It’s tough to say which is the greater of the ironies – that Israel is making common cause of a kind with the chief proxies of its supposed arch-enemy Iran, or that so many ground troops of the ‘Islamic Resistance’ are giving their lives to facilitate precisely the Zionist “project” they set out to thwart.
Note 1: Israel and the former colonial powers have wide latitudes and powerful media to distort and interpret current event as they wish the world community to believe. Lebanon is safer as the takfir rebels are kicked out of Qusayr, regardless of the many attempts for the extremist Moslems to ignite a civil war in Lebanon.
Note 2: The liberation of Qusayr from the Nusra Front insurgents closed the supply lines from Lebanon to reef Damascus (suburbs of Damascus), where the insurgents wanted to focus their attacks. The shortest supply line, far shorter than from Daraya on the Jordanian borders, was to move supplies, including weapons, from the Akkar province in north Lebanon, on to Qusayr, down to Ersal in Lebanon (less than 10 km away) and directly to reef of Damascus.
Adonis Diaries 