Workers at the 2022 World Cup told AFP: Qatar stole our dreams
In recent years, hundreds of thousands of workers have flocked to Qatar to work on mega-construction projects linked to the World Cup, which Doha will host next Sunday.” Migrants make up nearly 90 percent of Qatar’s 2.8 million population, who have traveled there in the hope of making hard-to-get money in their home countries of the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines, or African countries such as Kenya and Uganda.
Human rights criticism
According to rights groups, the improvements came too little and too late. According to France Press, French newspaper France Presse quoted an Indian worker – Saravan Kalade – who was working with his father in the same company that helped build roads leading to World Cup stadiums, but Saravan returned to India alone. “My 50-year-old father collapsed day after long working hours, and in the camp where he was living,” he said, “My father was in pain,” he said, “The hospital started 29 years ago He said working conditions “were not good at all,” speaking of long working hours and little overtime, adding that his father, a driver, “used to go to work at 3 a.m. and go back to 11 p.m.” He lives with eight people in a room inside the camp, which could not accommodate “four people to sit properly on the ground” due to its limited size.
Unpaid work
In the same context, the French newspaper dealt with the story of the Bangladeshi, Obon Mir, one of the workers who installed marble in the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha, which will host eight matches as part of the World Cup, but he returned to his homeland after four years in Qatar after being deprived of his salary, he told AFP, “What a beautiful stadium! “It’s incredibly beautiful, but the sad part is that even though we are part of this beautiful, giant building, we didn’t charge our salaries, the worker took our papers and withdrew all our money and ran away.”
Mir left his home in Sripur in rural western Bangladesh and headed to Qatar in 2016 in the hope of making enough money to change his life, paying for his trip with savings and loans from his father and other relatives. He worked for an Indian construction company in seven World Cup stadiums, but since he did not have a valid work permit, he was arrested in 2020 and deported. “I spent almost 700,000 taka (US$7,000) to go to Qatar to change my fate,” said the 33-year-old, “I came back home with 25 riyals ($8). This is the amount that Qatar has contributed to my life,” the father told two children in front of his home and a tea shop. “I dreamed of building a better house, living a better life, and sending my children to better schools, but none of these hopes were realized,” he said, Qatar’s host stole my dreams. He would wake up in the early hours to take the bus to the construction site and then work for 10 hours in extremely hot weather, he said. He spent days without food when he had no money and sometimes slept on the beach when he couldn’t pay his rent. “Every day we sweated from top to toe at work,” he explained, adding: “Blood turned to sweat in our bodies to build stadiums, but only to be thrown out without money.”
