Less than three weeks before the tournament kicks off, the Qatar World Cup remains shrouded in controversy – largely due to the deaths of migrants constructing the stadiums under dreadful conditions. FRANCE 24 spoke to the co-author of a new book detailing their plight.

For Krishna Timislina, who worked for several years at construction sites for the Qatar World Cup, the conditions were “hell on earth”. Interviewed by French journalists Sébastian Castelier and Quentin Muller for their book “Les Esclaves de l’Homme Pétrole” (“The Oil Man’s Slaves”), Timislina said that with “precarious living conditions, terrible water quality and interminable shifts, we know our health is being damaged – but do we have a choice?”

“So much of Qatar is being built thanks to our work – stadiums, shopping malls, bridges and roads are being constructed – but we’re not invited to share in the dream,” Timislina, 36, lamented.

He recounted working at a frenetic pace (sometimes 18 hours a day in searing heat and powered by energy drinks), water of dubious quality, prefab housing without space or privacy, and – most harrowingly – people dying from accidents or exhaustion.

In going to Qatar, workers from developing countries like India, Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya and Sudan are playing “the Russian roulette of migration”, Castelier said. “They try their luck, knowing it’s not absolutely certain that something terrible will happen to them. They’re attracted by the high salaries – very high compared to their countries they come from. They see it as an economic opportunity that’s worth the risks.”

Castelier and Muller gave a voice to many of them in their book, gathering some 60 testimonies. Qatar hosts nearly 400,000 migrant workers, often in conditions of modern-day slavery.

“It’s like a disposable workforce,” Castelier said. “That’s how migration to the Gulf states works. It’s impossible for an immigrant to obtain local citizenship. So when they’re no longer working, they have to leave. You could see how that happened during Covid when everything came to a standstill.”

But the Gulf nations are not the only ones benefitting from this system: 25 percent of Nepal’s GDP, for example, is produced by remittances from people working abroad. Many such governments are happy to see their citizens working in the Gulf states – and even encourage them by organising departures.

Exploitative ‘kafala’ system

Migrants arriving in Gulf states soon fall prey to an exploitative system, with “kafala” at the heart of it. A widely used system in the Gulf, a sponsor (or “kafeel”) is assigned to each migrant, often his or her employer. The system puts migrants at the mercy of their employers, who often confiscate their passports upon arrival.

The kafala system “gives the employer a lot of power over the employee”, Castelier said. “Everything is OK if the employer respects the rules. But if not, the employee’s life can become a living hell.”

In an attempt to improve its image as controversy swirled around the 2022 World Cup, Qatar officially abolished the kafala system in 2016. Yet in reality, “many aspects of it are still in force”, Castelier said. “Most notably, an employer can say that a migrant working for them is a fugitive. So if a domestic worker, for example, wants to denounce abuses by their employer, the latter can easily say that they have absconded – and instead of looking into the worker’s complaints, the police will just return them to their employer.”

“In Qatar there are perfectly good employers but also nefarious ones – like in every country,” Castelier said. “The problem is that, in Qatar, the bad employers can do whatever they want. There’s a sense of total impunity. Employers know that all they have to do is to send the migrants back to their countries of origin and they’ll never hear from them again.”  

Qatar has used a massive influx of foreign workers to build the infrastructure for the footballing extravaganza – with migrants building roads, a new airport, a railway network and seven new stadiums. However, the human cost has been dreadful. In a report published in August 2022, Amnesty International said that more than 15,021 foreigners of all ages and occupations had died in Qatar between 2010 and 2019, while conceding that the causes of death were not clear.

A February 2021 investigation by The Guardian found that at least 6,751 migrant workers died in Qatar from 2010 to 2020. But Castelier noted the real number is likely much higher. “These figures mainly come from Asian embassies in Qatar; we don’t have the statistics for African workers there.”

Moreover, Castelier and Muller point out in their book that The Guardian’s figure does not take into account workers who die after returning home. They point out that many such untimely deaths are due to kidney problems following the consumption of unsafe water. An Amnesty International investigation found that at least 6,751 migrant workers died in Qatar from 2010 to 2020 from drinking homemade alcohol and energy drinks as they struggle to keep up with the frantic work pace.

‘Risk of backsliding’

Qatar’s climate has a lot to do with the high mortality rate. “It’s very hot in the summer,” Castelier said. “It’s just hell working in the construction industry. Qatar has banned working outdoors in the open from 10:30am to 3pm, but many violations have been reported.”

Lack of training can be another cause of death. “They put people who haven’t been trained on huge machines or on scaffolding, and they often have no idea about safety measures – so there are plenty of accidents,” Castelier said.

Qatar knows all this makes for bad PR: “It’s perfectly aware that the stories about migrants workers are a problem; they’re constantly trying to put forward a narrative that they’re a modernising country.”

So Qatar jealously protects the image it wants to dominate the public imagination. Throughout the book, the two journalists describe an atmosphere where journalists are discouraged from straying off course from organised press tours and reporting about deaths on construction sites.

While reporting in Qatar’s industrial area where the stadiums were constructed, Castelier’s co-author Muller was set upon and then followed by two Qatari women keen to alert the police to the journalist’s presence in a place where Qatar’s dark side is hidden.

Qatar has lifted a ban on workers changing employers and has introduced a minimum monthly wage of 1,000 riyals (about €280). The Qatari government says it has done more than any other country in the region to improve conditions for migrant workers and strongly rejects media and rights groups’ reports of thousands of deaths on construction sites.

“Qatar has implemented reforms but it has done so quite late, so we will only know how significant they are after the World Cup,” Castelier said. “If they are not sincere, they risk backsliding on the treatment of migrant workers after the media’s attention goes elsewhere.”