The World Cup of Death

 Next Sunday, Qatar will be hosting the World Cup-- an event that the much-reviled Arab country hopes will buy it respectability on the global stage.  In reality, the event was built with the blood of impoverished and mistreated workers.  More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian revealed last year.

The findings, compiled from government sources, mean an average of 12 migrant workers from these five south Asian nations have died each week since the day the World Cup was awarded to Doha over ten years ago. Data from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka revealed there were 5,927 deaths of migrant workers in the period 2011–2020. Separately, data from Pakistan’s embassy in Qatar reported a further 824 deaths of Pakistani workers, between 2010 and 2020.

Since being awarded the World Cup, Qatar has embarked on an unprecedented building program, largely in preparation for the football tournament. In addition to seven new stadiums, dozens of major projects have been completed or are under way, including a new airport, roads, public transport systems, hotels and a new city, which will host the final match.

While death records are not categorized by occupation or place of work, it is likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup infrastructure projects, says Nick McGeehan, a director at FairSquare Projects, an advocacy group specializing in labor rights in the Gulf. “A very significant proportion of the migrant workers who have died since 2011 were only in the country because Qatar won the right to host the World Cup,” he said.

There have been 37 deaths among workers directly linked to construction of World Cup stadiums, of which 34 are classified as “non-work related” by the event’s organizing committee. Experts have questioned the use of the term because in some cases it has been used to describe deaths which have occurred on the job, including a number of workers who have collapsed and died on stadium construction sites. The findings expose Qatar’s failure to protect its 2 million-strong migrant workforce, or even investigate the causes of the apparently high rate of death among the largely young workers.

Behind the statistics lie countless stories of devastated families who have been left without their main breadwinner, struggling to gain compensation and confused about the circumstances of their loved one’s death.

Ghal Singh Rai from Nepal paid nearly £1,000 in recruitment fees for his job as a cleaner in a camp for workers building the Education City World Cup stadium. Within a week of arriving, he killed himself.

Another worker, Mohammad Shahid Miah, from Bangladesh, was electrocuted in his worker accommodation after water came into contact with exposed electricity cables.

In India, the family of Madhu Bollapally have never understood how the healthy 43-year old died of “natural causes” while working in Qatar. His body was found lying on his dorm room floor.

Qatar’s grim death toll is revealed in long spreadsheets of official data listing the causes of death: multiple blunt injuries due to a fall from height; asphyxia due to hanging; undetermined cause of death due to decomposition.  But among the causes, the most common by far is so-called “natural deaths”, often attributed to acute heart or respiratory failure.

The Guardian previously reported that such classifications, which are usually made without an autopsy, often fail to provide a legitimate medical explanation for the underlying cause of these deaths.

In 2019 it found that Qatar’s intense summer heat is likely to be a significant factor in many worker deaths. The Guardian’s findings were supported by research commissioned by the UN’s International Labour Organization which revealed that for at least four months of the year workers faced significant heat stress when working outside.

Qatar continues to “drag its feet on this critical and urgent issue in apparent disregard for workers’ lives”, said Hiba Zayadin, Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch. “We have called on Qatar to amend its law on autopsies to require forensic investigations into all sudden or unexplained deaths, and pass legislation to require that all death certificates include reference to a medically meaningful cause of death,” she said.  Other significant causes of deaths among Indians, Nepalis and Bangladeshis are road accidents (12%), workplace accidents (7%) and suicide (7%).

“There is a real lack of clarity and transparency surrounding these deaths,” said May Romanos, Gulf researcher for Amnesty International. “There is a need for Qatar to strengthen its occupational health and safety standards.”