| Is the World Cup Worth the Price? 22:45 - Sep 27 with 2117 views | RamsTrust |
THE WORLD CUP WITH BLOOD ON ITS HANDS
From www.twohundredpercent.net
There comes a point at which the rotten core at the heart of football will
become too much for most to take. We have come to accept the greed and the
avarice as a part of life, as if there is no other way in which these
people behave, and we are pacified only, it seems, by the collection of
three points on a Saturday afternoon. Perhaps, though, for the corrupt
culture that has burrowed its way into FIFA over as many decades as you
choose to select from, some sort of day of reckoning is fast approaching.
We all took the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar as being utterly
and hopelessly corrupt to the core, a decision made for dozens of reasons
that had little to do with anything but the greasing of palms, and the
endless quest to accommodate the tournament up to the point of holding it
in the middle of the winter for the first time has done little to satisfy
those who have who have already arrived at this conclusion. On the whole,
though, the arguments in favour of moving the 2022 World Cup Finals have
been dismissed with a sneer by FIFA, Perhaps, though, that situation is
about to change.
When misgivings about awarding the 2022 World Cup Finals to a micro-state
with no discernable football culture to speak of were first aired in this
country, they were dismissed by FIFA as being the jealous whines of a
nation that had just lost out on a bid to host the tournament. Never mind
that it wasn’t the same tournament as the one that people were expressing
these misgivings about. There are enough people out there who blindly hate
the British for the likes of Sepp Blatter to be able to easily deflect
criticism to an appreciative audience. There is, therefore a certain irony
to the fact that the real shame of this tournament has been revealed by a
British newspaper. We suspect that this time Blatter will not find it as
easy to brush criticisms aside.
It has been The Guardian that has spent much of this exposing the
appalling condition that migrants working on the construction of
facilities in Qatar which are being built in no small part in preparation
for what will doubtlessly be an orgy of opulence in just under nine years
time. They found that Nepalese workers have been dying at a rate of almost
one a day, whilst workers face exploitation and abuses that amount to
modern-day slavery. Further claims have alleged that workers have been
denied water whilst working, have had wages withheld to prevent them from
leaving Qatar — something made considerably easier by the debt that
migrant workers find themselves in just to get there in the first place —
whilst the International Trade Union Confederation has claimed that the
2022 World Cup is on course to cost the lives of at least 4000 migrant
workers before it starts.
The usual ameliorating platitudes have already been offered by FIFA, who
have stated that they are “”very concerned about the reports presented by
the media regarding labour rights’ abuses and the conditions for
construction workers” (something that they could have found out a little
more about had they bothered to look, well, during the bidding process),
whilst Qatar’s World Cup organisers have stated they were “appalled” by
the Guardian revelations and said there was “no excuse” for the
mistreatment of workers, a statement which indicates that they were
similarly oblivious to persistent claims regarding exactly this that have
been made for some time with regard to the treatment of immigrant workers
in their country. After all, more than 700 Indian workers died in Qatar
between 2010 and 2012.
Perhaps, though, they only care so much because it has been exposed so
publicly. This is, after all, very publicity for the tournament, the
governing body and its organisers, and rightly so. But what can we do? The
truth of the matter is that FIFA and the tournament organisers could just
try and ride this out. After all, it’s still almost nine years before the
tournament starts and people’s memories seem to be getting shorter and
shorter these days. This, however, doesn’t mean that we should do nothing.
Trying to apply pressure to those organising it all would seem to be
beyond our reach. The Football Association in this country, however,
aren’t, and pressure should be applied for this organisation to actually
stick its head above the parapet for once and make it clear they will not
tolerate this sort of behaviour in what is ultimately their name.
It may or may not work, but it has to be worth a throw of the dice. The
World Cup has a history that will be irrevocably tarnished — and has been
before in 1978, when the hosting of the tournament held by a country with
a military junta caused outrage, but nowhere near the level of organised
global protest that improvements in communications and technology now make
possible — by the being associated with this sort of situation. If there
is a moment at which push must come to shove, then this, surely should be
it. There is no moral argument to make that justifies the conditions in
which those desperate enough to seek work in Qatar, and even if it was
possible to make one, it would surely still be impossible to argue that
this should be infrastructure for the hosting of a bloody football
tournament. The World Cup should be removed from Qatar, and if this
doesn’t happen, then FIFA should be stripped of the omnipotence that it
holds by whatever means are necessary.
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