Qatar has been all over the news the last few days, and not in a good way.
As I'm sure you've all seen, there are continuing concerns about the country's ability to deliver a successful World Cup in 9 years time, and some pretty appalling allegations about the way migrant workers, mostly Nepali, are treated here. There have been calls for investigations from Human Rights Watch and the International Trades Unions Organizations, which went so far as to accuse Qatar of being a slave state. Football people - players, managers and journalists - have expressed concerns about playing the tournament in the summer, and have called for it to be moved away from Qatar to an alternative (and cooler) venue. Proposals to move it to winter months have largely met resistance because that would mean massive changes to league schedules across the world, and cost billions of dollars in lost revenues - something the English Premier League have been particularly vociferous about.
So what is the truth? Is the tournament doomed, at least for that year? Or will this oil rich little desert nation actually pull it off?
After spending the past couple of weeks in a still scorching Doha, let me give you my five penn'orth.
First of all, let's deal with the climate issue. Yes, it is bloody hot here. When I landed, at midnight a couple of Saturdays ago, the temperature was still in the high 30s. During the day, for most of the last two weeks, it's been over 40 (though cooler the last three days at around 37 - 38) - but then today, it's shot up again. As I write, it's 4:30 in the afternoon, it's early October, and it's 42C in the city centre. Today, as in all Muslim countries, it's the first day of the weekend, a day of prayer, so no work....for me, a good opportunity to do a bit more sightseeing.
Last weekend, I walked the three kilometres from the hotel to the Corniche (that's like Southend Promenade only without the beach or fish and chip shops or amusement arcades). It was hot and sunny and I had forgotten to take water with me, but after risking life and limb through the roadworks - of which more in a minute - I got there. I even managed to find a patch of sand about the size of the interior of a BMW 7 series saloon, and had a paddle in the bath-warm Gulf waters. I needed a coffee or an ice cream after that, so headed along the path towards the modern part of the city, expecting to find somewhere along the way. I didn't, and ended up exhausted in a Starbucks in the huge (and really rather good) City Centre Mall. I guess in total I walked a good 7km, during the hottest part of the day - and felt terrible. I caught a taxi back to the hotel. Today, I went in the opposite direction, again strolling along, but left earlier, hoping to catch cooler weather. I found the Corniche, this time along near the old traditional fishing harbour at the far end of the bay from the shining new business district and the City Mall. Again, I got caught up in roadworks, and again found nowhere to get a drink. Forewarned is forearmed, and I took a couple of bottles of water with me, but by this time the water was warm verging on hot - you could probably shave in it - where I had carried it in my pocket. Most unpleasant. There were few taxis around, so I walked back to the hotel. Probably I did another 7 km, and I felt even worse this time when I got back.
Now I like the sunshine and hot weather. Give me a sandy beach, factor 30, some sea to cool off in, and I'm a happy chappy. Well, here there is sunshine. I have my factor 30. But there is no beach (unless you're staying in the Hilton or the Sheraton or one of the other luxury hotels, all of which have their own private ones, but my budget doesn't run that far, I'm afraid). But basically, it is just TOO hot. And again, we are in October here...... I'm reasonably fit and healthy, better than many people my age, and active enough to go on expeditions like this without keeling over (and thank God for that!), so if I'm having issues with the climate what is the average English or German or Norwegian fan (assuming their countries qualify in 2022) - or anyone else from outside of Africa really - going to feel about it, in the height of summer, when temperatures can reach (and sometimes exceed) a killing 50C?
The Qatari's official answer to this is air conditioning. They plan to install state-of-the-art aircon plants at all venues and fan zones and training grounds, to keep everyone cool. It sounds the stuff of science fiction, but if the air conditioning at the hotel and office is anything to go by, they will do it quite comfortably. They have 9 years to perfect the system, after all.
My hotel is perhaps half a kilometre from the office. I've walked it a couple of times, in the relative cool of the evening, but I wouldn't want to do it during the day - especially after the experience of the past two weekends, and in a suit and tie to boot. So the bank pick us up in either a BMW 7 series or a Mitsubishi Shogun 4 track, depending on which is available. Both ferry us to and from our destinations in air conditioned comfort. The hotel is cool and comfortable, and of course each room has its own temperature control. Sometimes the cleaners seem to fiddle about with the controls while I'm at work, so I come back to an ice box. The project room at the bank is also comfortably cool - indeed, one of the guys keeps his jacket on all day (which seems a bit much to me) - so clearly, Qatar are Air Conditioning Masters. So if they say they can build 60 or 70,000 capacity stadia that are fully air conditioned so that pitch temperatures for the players are in the mid 20s, even when the atmosphere outside is twice that, then I for one am not going to argue. They will do it, I have no doubt. And if they can manage that, then equally I'm sure they will be able to provide outdoor Fan Zones that are equally cool and comfortable. (I take it as a matter of course that all the hotels will be fine).
But what will they be able to do outside of these areas? If you assume there will be off-days, when there are no matches (and that will certainly be the case, especially after the group stages are over and the knock out rounds commenced) then will these air conditioned Fan Zones still be open for use? Because during these times the punters will still be in town, in their thousands, and will want somewhere to go and something to do. What are you going to do, when there is no match and a day or two to kill, in 50C temperatures? From experience, I know hanging around in hotels can be soul destroyingly boring, and it will be even worse here, because alcohol is prohibited in the country - so no sitting in the bar necking chilled Heineken or whatever. That will go down well with the average football fan, of any nationality......
I'm assuming the organizers are aware of this and will plan accordingly. One condition that FIFA insist on for any host country is that the approved beer sponsor (currently Heineken) is able to sell its wares in vast quantities, so Qatar must have agreed to comply with this clause, and relax their licencing laws at least for the duration of the tournament. Who knows, Blatter and his merry men may just have opened a Pandora's Box in this region - and everyone knows how hard it is to close that, once it's been prised open.....just ask any ex-Communist Bloc country that allowed free (or at least less weighted) elections back in the 80s and 90s, or more recently the string of countries that overthrew their governments in favour of some form of democracy during the Arab Spring a couple of years ago.
The issue of workers' rights is less easy for me to write about.
The country (or at least Doha) is a massive building site. There are cranes and building plots and roadworks everywhere. Not all of it is directly related to the World Cup - no construction work has started on the new stadia yet, for instance - but there are many hotel projects under way, many new residential and office buildings going up, and many long term transport improvements. A metro system is under construction, to ease the appalling traffic congestion around the city. New roads are being built too, and existing ones improved, with traffic light controlled intersections replacing roundabouts. Major work in this respect is taking place along the Corniche, hence the gauntlet I've run the past two weekends getting there. Qatari drivers are typical of many others in this part of the world - which is to say generally poor - and the situation is made worse by the cars. Now in Lebanon and Egypt, for instance, most vehicles seem to be rust bucket Asian motors from Hyundai and Kia, Nissan and Toyota, or else old Mercedes barges. Here, the vehicle of choice is a big white Toyota Land Cruiser (usually with some really nifty pastel shaded go-faster stripe patterns along both sides - some of them are really cool). Or BMW 7s. Or Mercs. Just along from the hotel I saw today three car dealerships, side by side: first came Bentley, then McLaren, then Lamborghini. Very nice. I saw a Lambo and Mustang having a drag race away from traffic lights last weekend (the Lambo won easily). So in this ludicrously rich country, the locals do love their cars, and do love to drive them fast. Hence the high accident rates.
Equally, someone who drives a Porsche or a Land Cruiser is not going to be working on a building site. Which is why something like 80% of the workforce (at least that outside of offices and shops) is imported labour. This is not at all unusual - the same is true in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and many other countries across the world, not only in the Middle East. What is also not at all unusual is that the construction companies who hire the labour want to get away with the minimum they can manage to provide, both on wages and all the ancillary bits that go with it - the accident insurance, accommodation and so on - in order to maximize their profits. I'm not sure the concept of a minimum wage, so beloved of human rights and labour groups world wide, has really permeated the construction industry as it has elsewhere. It's not unusual for migrant workers to live in below standard barracks, work long hours for peanuts, and lose their limbs (or tragically lives) in avoidable accidents. What makes the situation worse here, it seems, are two factors.
First the weather. If it's uncomfortable enough to go for a stroll during the day here in October, how much worse is it digging holes to lay new water mains, or building a new hotel, or whatever? There have been many deaths on the construction sites across Qatar and many of them have been attributed to heart failure caused by working outside, for long hours, in these intolerably hot conditions.
Second is the way workers have allegedly been treated, The papers and news services have run many stories in the past week, ahead of FIFA's meeting this weekend, highlighting abuses that range from the abnormally high death rates (65 from the Nepali community alone in the past two months - that's one a day) to workers being forced to live seven or eight to a room in squalid barracks in the middle of the desert with rudimentary facilities, to passports being held by employers to prevent people who have had enough jumping on the next boat out of here.
I have no idea how much of this has been exaggerated by the press for the sake of a good story - the pictures on CNN have been pretty convincing. But it is a fact that most of the workers on these sites come from countries like India and Pakistan, Bangladesh and (particularly) Nepal where even the allegedly slave wages earned here exceed anything they are likely to earn back home. It's also true that across the Gulf region, the oil-rich Arab does look at the migrant worker as very much a second class citizen, somehow sub-human. It could be argued that, to a lesser extent, this casual racism exists in other cultures and circumstances too - look at the vitriol that pours out from the disgusting I'm British and Proud website every day, the hate that shows in the message boards on Yahoo News aimed at (mostly honest and hard-working) Eastern Europeans, or French plans to round up all 30,000 Roma - including many born in the country and holding citizenship (out of a total population of France of over 65 million) - and dumping them back in Bulgaria and Romania. So sadly this sort of thing is not confined to Qatar.
To its credit, the government has pledged to set up an independent commission, headed by an international lawyer, to investigate the situation and make whatever changes are needed to improve it. That will be interesting: let's see what punishments (if any) are dished out in the months to come.
But back to my headline question - can Qatar deliver a successful World Cup in 2022?
My belief is that if any country in this region can do so, then Qatar is that country. The place is sitting on a seemingly bottomless pit of petrodollars, so money is no object. Nothing can be done about the climate (arguably global warming could make matters worse before a ball is kicked), but if the cutting edge technology is there to make things more comfortable for everybody, then the authorities here seem more than ready to embrace it. The organizing committee is certainly committed to the project, and is happy to provide a change to a winter tournament if that is what FIFA decide they want to do - it makes no difference to them whether the matches are held in January and February or June and July 2022: the same facilities will be built and provided in either case, for the same cost. For that, I applaud them.
So it really comes back to FIFA. Blatter and others have already admitted that they may have been a little hasty in awarding the tournament to Qatar, but at their annual meeting in Zurich today insisted that no decision would be made until after Brazil's 2014 tournament. Ever the showman, Blatter also announced separately (and probably unofficially) on his Twitter feed that the tournament "would be held in Qatar" - only the date, summer or winter, is to be decided.
Which is a typical FIFA fudge.
As I'm sure you've all seen, there are continuing concerns about the country's ability to deliver a successful World Cup in 9 years time, and some pretty appalling allegations about the way migrant workers, mostly Nepali, are treated here. There have been calls for investigations from Human Rights Watch and the International Trades Unions Organizations, which went so far as to accuse Qatar of being a slave state. Football people - players, managers and journalists - have expressed concerns about playing the tournament in the summer, and have called for it to be moved away from Qatar to an alternative (and cooler) venue. Proposals to move it to winter months have largely met resistance because that would mean massive changes to league schedules across the world, and cost billions of dollars in lost revenues - something the English Premier League have been particularly vociferous about.
So what is the truth? Is the tournament doomed, at least for that year? Or will this oil rich little desert nation actually pull it off?
After spending the past couple of weeks in a still scorching Doha, let me give you my five penn'orth.
First of all, let's deal with the climate issue. Yes, it is bloody hot here. When I landed, at midnight a couple of Saturdays ago, the temperature was still in the high 30s. During the day, for most of the last two weeks, it's been over 40 (though cooler the last three days at around 37 - 38) - but then today, it's shot up again. As I write, it's 4:30 in the afternoon, it's early October, and it's 42C in the city centre. Today, as in all Muslim countries, it's the first day of the weekend, a day of prayer, so no work....for me, a good opportunity to do a bit more sightseeing.
Last weekend, I walked the three kilometres from the hotel to the Corniche (that's like Southend Promenade only without the beach or fish and chip shops or amusement arcades). It was hot and sunny and I had forgotten to take water with me, but after risking life and limb through the roadworks - of which more in a minute - I got there. I even managed to find a patch of sand about the size of the interior of a BMW 7 series saloon, and had a paddle in the bath-warm Gulf waters. I needed a coffee or an ice cream after that, so headed along the path towards the modern part of the city, expecting to find somewhere along the way. I didn't, and ended up exhausted in a Starbucks in the huge (and really rather good) City Centre Mall. I guess in total I walked a good 7km, during the hottest part of the day - and felt terrible. I caught a taxi back to the hotel. Today, I went in the opposite direction, again strolling along, but left earlier, hoping to catch cooler weather. I found the Corniche, this time along near the old traditional fishing harbour at the far end of the bay from the shining new business district and the City Mall. Again, I got caught up in roadworks, and again found nowhere to get a drink. Forewarned is forearmed, and I took a couple of bottles of water with me, but by this time the water was warm verging on hot - you could probably shave in it - where I had carried it in my pocket. Most unpleasant. There were few taxis around, so I walked back to the hotel. Probably I did another 7 km, and I felt even worse this time when I got back.
Now I like the sunshine and hot weather. Give me a sandy beach, factor 30, some sea to cool off in, and I'm a happy chappy. Well, here there is sunshine. I have my factor 30. But there is no beach (unless you're staying in the Hilton or the Sheraton or one of the other luxury hotels, all of which have their own private ones, but my budget doesn't run that far, I'm afraid). But basically, it is just TOO hot. And again, we are in October here...... I'm reasonably fit and healthy, better than many people my age, and active enough to go on expeditions like this without keeling over (and thank God for that!), so if I'm having issues with the climate what is the average English or German or Norwegian fan (assuming their countries qualify in 2022) - or anyone else from outside of Africa really - going to feel about it, in the height of summer, when temperatures can reach (and sometimes exceed) a killing 50C?
The Qatari's official answer to this is air conditioning. They plan to install state-of-the-art aircon plants at all venues and fan zones and training grounds, to keep everyone cool. It sounds the stuff of science fiction, but if the air conditioning at the hotel and office is anything to go by, they will do it quite comfortably. They have 9 years to perfect the system, after all.
My hotel is perhaps half a kilometre from the office. I've walked it a couple of times, in the relative cool of the evening, but I wouldn't want to do it during the day - especially after the experience of the past two weekends, and in a suit and tie to boot. So the bank pick us up in either a BMW 7 series or a Mitsubishi Shogun 4 track, depending on which is available. Both ferry us to and from our destinations in air conditioned comfort. The hotel is cool and comfortable, and of course each room has its own temperature control. Sometimes the cleaners seem to fiddle about with the controls while I'm at work, so I come back to an ice box. The project room at the bank is also comfortably cool - indeed, one of the guys keeps his jacket on all day (which seems a bit much to me) - so clearly, Qatar are Air Conditioning Masters. So if they say they can build 60 or 70,000 capacity stadia that are fully air conditioned so that pitch temperatures for the players are in the mid 20s, even when the atmosphere outside is twice that, then I for one am not going to argue. They will do it, I have no doubt. And if they can manage that, then equally I'm sure they will be able to provide outdoor Fan Zones that are equally cool and comfortable. (I take it as a matter of course that all the hotels will be fine).
But what will they be able to do outside of these areas? If you assume there will be off-days, when there are no matches (and that will certainly be the case, especially after the group stages are over and the knock out rounds commenced) then will these air conditioned Fan Zones still be open for use? Because during these times the punters will still be in town, in their thousands, and will want somewhere to go and something to do. What are you going to do, when there is no match and a day or two to kill, in 50C temperatures? From experience, I know hanging around in hotels can be soul destroyingly boring, and it will be even worse here, because alcohol is prohibited in the country - so no sitting in the bar necking chilled Heineken or whatever. That will go down well with the average football fan, of any nationality......
I'm assuming the organizers are aware of this and will plan accordingly. One condition that FIFA insist on for any host country is that the approved beer sponsor (currently Heineken) is able to sell its wares in vast quantities, so Qatar must have agreed to comply with this clause, and relax their licencing laws at least for the duration of the tournament. Who knows, Blatter and his merry men may just have opened a Pandora's Box in this region - and everyone knows how hard it is to close that, once it's been prised open.....just ask any ex-Communist Bloc country that allowed free (or at least less weighted) elections back in the 80s and 90s, or more recently the string of countries that overthrew their governments in favour of some form of democracy during the Arab Spring a couple of years ago.
The issue of workers' rights is less easy for me to write about.
The country (or at least Doha) is a massive building site. There are cranes and building plots and roadworks everywhere. Not all of it is directly related to the World Cup - no construction work has started on the new stadia yet, for instance - but there are many hotel projects under way, many new residential and office buildings going up, and many long term transport improvements. A metro system is under construction, to ease the appalling traffic congestion around the city. New roads are being built too, and existing ones improved, with traffic light controlled intersections replacing roundabouts. Major work in this respect is taking place along the Corniche, hence the gauntlet I've run the past two weekends getting there. Qatari drivers are typical of many others in this part of the world - which is to say generally poor - and the situation is made worse by the cars. Now in Lebanon and Egypt, for instance, most vehicles seem to be rust bucket Asian motors from Hyundai and Kia, Nissan and Toyota, or else old Mercedes barges. Here, the vehicle of choice is a big white Toyota Land Cruiser (usually with some really nifty pastel shaded go-faster stripe patterns along both sides - some of them are really cool). Or BMW 7s. Or Mercs. Just along from the hotel I saw today three car dealerships, side by side: first came Bentley, then McLaren, then Lamborghini. Very nice. I saw a Lambo and Mustang having a drag race away from traffic lights last weekend (the Lambo won easily). So in this ludicrously rich country, the locals do love their cars, and do love to drive them fast. Hence the high accident rates.
Equally, someone who drives a Porsche or a Land Cruiser is not going to be working on a building site. Which is why something like 80% of the workforce (at least that outside of offices and shops) is imported labour. This is not at all unusual - the same is true in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and many other countries across the world, not only in the Middle East. What is also not at all unusual is that the construction companies who hire the labour want to get away with the minimum they can manage to provide, both on wages and all the ancillary bits that go with it - the accident insurance, accommodation and so on - in order to maximize their profits. I'm not sure the concept of a minimum wage, so beloved of human rights and labour groups world wide, has really permeated the construction industry as it has elsewhere. It's not unusual for migrant workers to live in below standard barracks, work long hours for peanuts, and lose their limbs (or tragically lives) in avoidable accidents. What makes the situation worse here, it seems, are two factors.
First the weather. If it's uncomfortable enough to go for a stroll during the day here in October, how much worse is it digging holes to lay new water mains, or building a new hotel, or whatever? There have been many deaths on the construction sites across Qatar and many of them have been attributed to heart failure caused by working outside, for long hours, in these intolerably hot conditions.
Second is the way workers have allegedly been treated, The papers and news services have run many stories in the past week, ahead of FIFA's meeting this weekend, highlighting abuses that range from the abnormally high death rates (65 from the Nepali community alone in the past two months - that's one a day) to workers being forced to live seven or eight to a room in squalid barracks in the middle of the desert with rudimentary facilities, to passports being held by employers to prevent people who have had enough jumping on the next boat out of here.
I have no idea how much of this has been exaggerated by the press for the sake of a good story - the pictures on CNN have been pretty convincing. But it is a fact that most of the workers on these sites come from countries like India and Pakistan, Bangladesh and (particularly) Nepal where even the allegedly slave wages earned here exceed anything they are likely to earn back home. It's also true that across the Gulf region, the oil-rich Arab does look at the migrant worker as very much a second class citizen, somehow sub-human. It could be argued that, to a lesser extent, this casual racism exists in other cultures and circumstances too - look at the vitriol that pours out from the disgusting I'm British and Proud website every day, the hate that shows in the message boards on Yahoo News aimed at (mostly honest and hard-working) Eastern Europeans, or French plans to round up all 30,000 Roma - including many born in the country and holding citizenship (out of a total population of France of over 65 million) - and dumping them back in Bulgaria and Romania. So sadly this sort of thing is not confined to Qatar.
To its credit, the government has pledged to set up an independent commission, headed by an international lawyer, to investigate the situation and make whatever changes are needed to improve it. That will be interesting: let's see what punishments (if any) are dished out in the months to come.
But back to my headline question - can Qatar deliver a successful World Cup in 2022?
My belief is that if any country in this region can do so, then Qatar is that country. The place is sitting on a seemingly bottomless pit of petrodollars, so money is no object. Nothing can be done about the climate (arguably global warming could make matters worse before a ball is kicked), but if the cutting edge technology is there to make things more comfortable for everybody, then the authorities here seem more than ready to embrace it. The organizing committee is certainly committed to the project, and is happy to provide a change to a winter tournament if that is what FIFA decide they want to do - it makes no difference to them whether the matches are held in January and February or June and July 2022: the same facilities will be built and provided in either case, for the same cost. For that, I applaud them.
So it really comes back to FIFA. Blatter and others have already admitted that they may have been a little hasty in awarding the tournament to Qatar, but at their annual meeting in Zurich today insisted that no decision would be made until after Brazil's 2014 tournament. Ever the showman, Blatter also announced separately (and probably unofficially) on his Twitter feed that the tournament "would be held in Qatar" - only the date, summer or winter, is to be decided.
Which is a typical FIFA fudge.
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