Qatar World Cup: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

foreign [Music] concerns the World Cup it's like the Super Bowl except the rest of the world actually gives a the World Cup is a big deal a country even qualifying for it is a cause for huge celebration just watch the watch this Australian reporter lose his mind when his Nation beat Peru on penalties to make it to the tournament how good is this [Applause] foreign to amplify people's Joy shrieking to the guy kissing the camera to someone stealing his scarf which sadly he never got back and the reason I know that is I have it now sure it used to be your mom's but now it's all mine the World Cup got underway today and we've talked before about the organization behind it FIFA a cartel-like group of scumbags and assorted criminals who occasionally put on soccer matches feed FIFA has always been terrible which is what makes it a little hard to hear FIFA's current president claim that their event isn't just about sport it's a net positive for Humanity this FIFA World Cup a tournament of peace and unity will be the one that brings the world together after some difficult times we should never underestimate the unifying power something so unique has well that is some pretty grandiose talk coming from the star of what the are those eyebrows Charlie Brown but the truth is a lot more complicated than that which is not to say that I am not excited about the World Cup because I am it only happens every four years and I look forward to it the way people with leap year birthdays look forward to leap years with an enthusiasm somewhere between understandable and honestly kind of pathetic and this world cup is being hosted for the very first time in the Middle East by the small nation of Qatar which is going all out to turn it into a major branding event even signing a massive multi-million dollar agreement with David Beckham to be an ambassador for the country which presumably includes getting him to make more videos like this I think everyone knows how much I love food and the food culture is very exciting in Qatar this is what I love you know I love to go to spice markets I love to go to fish markets I love American oh yeah oh yeah everybody knows how much I love attacker but what I love is also we are now in this amazing Place yeah yeah using the traditional spices I love riding I love a bike Community I love being in the middle of nowhere and talking and 18 and this is perfection for me so but I have lost the following food food a taco bike culture and of course being in the middle of nowhere eating and talking they really should have just kept taking him to places to see what they could get him to say he loves for money I love public bathrooms the Aromas the atmosphere I just love them I love cemeteries everyone knows how much I love tombstones and grieving families I love Proctologist offices I just love Proctologist culture this is perfection for me the point is the next month is qatar's Big Moment On The World stage they're hosting an event expected to attract over a million Spectators in person to a country just the size of Connecticut but as you may have heard underneath the fun pageantry and David Beckham doing bad Anthony Bourdain cosplay is a much darker story small signs of which have leaked out this week like in this moment from a Danish reporter but then foreign you invited the whole world to the you invited the whole world to come here why can't we film it's a public place but you can break the camera okay you break the camera okay so you're threatening Us by by Smashing the camera wow just a reminder he was asked how would you describe working conditions for journalists in Qatar and just seconds later a bunch of golf cart goons showed up to answer that question for him although credit to this guy for being so excited to appear on Daily News TV and we gave the camera a little wave before presumably smashing the out of it Russian journalist is just the tip of the iceberg here one that includes a host of human rights violations so given all of that tonight let's talk about the Qatar World Cup and let's start by going back to the moment back in 2010 when the winner of the bid to Hostess tournament was announced by the former head of FIFA sepplatter the winner to organize the 222 FIFA World Cup is Qatar look as a general rule I try not to make fun of old men who don't speak English as a first language but due to evil sepplatter is an exception and him saying 222 like a vampire telling the time will just always be funny to me but that moment truly stunned people because for reasons that it turns out FIFA were fully aware of Qatar was a fundamentally unsound choice for a summer soccer tournament FIFA conducted its own objective analysis of the various bids which found that Qatar was an unsuitable place to host the World Cup and a dangerous place to host the World Cup that the summer temperatures would be a hazard to the health of the players and the fans that Doha simply didn't have space for the kind of Stadium infrastructure that was going to be required they would have to build nine new stadiums and there wasn't enough room for them in Doha so they would have to kind of create a whole new city yeah Qatar wasn't just a surprising Choice it was logically inexplicable it'd be like if the Westminster dog show awarded the best in show title to a tortoise nothing against that tortoise but not only should it not have won it should have been automatically disqualified now the first and most obvious problem was that Qatar is notoriously scorching hot in the summer that is why FIFA eventually moved the World Cup to November but qatar's initial pitch simply pretended that heat wouldn't be an issue promising that they built air-conditioned outdoor stadiums while Qatari scientists pitched ideas like a massive remote control artificial Cloud that they could move around to cover stadiums in shade which a didn't exist and B wouldn't solve your problem anyway it's the multi-million dollar equivalent of pulling down the little car flap to keep the Sun out of your eyes and at this point you will not be surprised to learn of the many accusations that Qatar won their World Cup bid through bribery with allegations including that three of the officials who agreed to vote for Qatar did so in exchange for a million dollars each and I won't say the guitar definitely got the World Cup through bribery but I won't say that they didn't and I will say that they did and what well they deny that there was any misconduct in their bid the fact remained they were going to need to build not just a bunch of new stadiums but also a new airport metro system roads and about a hundred new hotels they had to build so much new infrastructure in fact that even the World Cup's mascot laib doesn't seem to be able to believe what his country has just done first thing I want to show you is the stadiums oh the stadiums it's mind-blowing Arenas designed by some of the best architects in the world this is the same city can you believe it didn't exist 10 years ago now it's one of the city's hosting FIFA World Cup matches you know what life I can't believe that City wasn't there 10 years ago either and it's actually a bit alarming if you drove by an empty plot of land with a sign reading coming soon at TGI Fridays and the very next day drove by and saw the grand opening of it you've only have some questions about how the it happened that fast according to one estimate qatar's government has spent more than 300 billion dollars on infrastructure projects and look they can afford that they have a lot of money thanks to their huge oil and natural gas reserves what they don't have a lot of though is qataris because Qatari Nationals only number around 380 000. however the country has an overall population of nearly 3 million and that is because ninety percent of it consists of foreigners and migrant workers and it's migrant workers who perform most of the manual labor there and those laborers are the ones who've had to build all the new infrastructure for this tournament which brings us to one of the major scandals underlying it guitar recruited hundreds of thousands of workers mainly from India Nepal and Bangladesh through agencies in their home countries just to secure a job migrants had little choice but to pay recruitment fees of up to four thousand dollars before they left the country and once they got to Qatar they were already in debt and trapped in a system known in the Middle East as kafala the kafala system can be a form of modern day slavery and the features of it the mount in some cases to force labor it's true all the new stadiums and infrastructure were essentially built through modern day slavery so we should probably introduce a new collective noun to refer to this group of stadiums a gaggle of geese a pot of whales an atrocity of stadiums the Kabbalah system exists in some form in several countries in the Middle East and under it in Qatar workers couldn't switch jobs or leave the country without the explicit permission of their employer in some cases because they might have literally had their passport taken away and being so fully dependent on an employer meant that laborers had virtually no rights take a niche a laborer from Nepal who maintains that he was routinely underpaid and for doing work in truly brutal conditions I went to Qatar in 2019 on the 21st of March I started working at the Lucille Stadium it was very hot in Qatar it got up to 52 degrees Celsius the first year I was there I used to sweat in the exact way as if it was raining from the sky you know how halt Greek Celsius is if you build a stadium in that heat you should get to own it that shouldn't be Lucile stadium that should be a niche's stadium and no one should be allowed inside it without saying that out loud and there's something pretty up about arguing it's too hot for Peak athletes to be outside for 90 minutes but you know what it's completely fine for people to build stadiums in that heat for hours a day and for months on end and that's not even getting into the living conditions that workers there were subjected to we drove outside the city to a place the government doesn't want people to see the sprawling labor camps where the workers are housed inside the men were packed wall to wall ate to a room the heat was stifling the kitchen filthy the beds they told us infested with bed bugs 22 year old coomb lives here among 150 other men they share two bathrooms there's no shower here there's nowhere to wash your body where do you wash your body then buckets hard to believe but in these camps it's routine at another Camp the toilets overflowed with sewage and two filthy kitchens were being shared by 600 men that is horrifying no one should ever have to live like that just wait until laib finds out about this yeah yeah your tournaments built on human suffering buddy and you should know when that reporter went and talked to the head of one of qatar's leading Sports organizations it didn't go well you go yourself uninvestigate it you will see them living in a very you know comfortable healthy environment comfortable and healthy of course in a very healthy environment alhamdulillah with all due respect we have gone to the camps you went yourself yes this week in Doha where you have hundreds of thousands of men living in labor camps some of them packed into small rooms eight men to a room like the one we saw 10 men sharing a toilet no showers have you been to the the labor camps yourself sir I'm not gonna answer your questions you don't want to answer that of course I don't want to answer it and with that we were told the interview was over incredible nothing says workers live in a comfortable and healthy environment quite like leaving the room 30 seconds after you realize that the person you're talking to has actually seen that environment and it gets worse a guardian investigation found that 6 500 migrant workers died in Qatar from 2010 to 2020. now that number accounts for all migrant worker deaths in Qatar not just those who worked on stadiums but the Qatari government's preferred count states that they've actually only been 37 deaths among laborers at World Cup stadiums and of those that only three were work related but if that number seems suspiciously low to you it's because it very much is their preferred count is conveniently limited to the small handful of work sites that were under the highest level of scrutiny and exclude the hundreds of other World Cup related projects what's more autopsies weren't done on most of these workers with one investigation finding that nearly 70 percent of deaths of Indian Nepali and Bangladeshi Nationals were attributed simply to natural causes or Cardiac Arrest which feels deliberately vague because Cardiac Arrest just means their heart stopped which is literally how everybody dies I can tell you with full confidence that his heart stopped is how both I and kid's Rock will die that doesn't mean that our Cardiac Arrest will be caused by the same thing though does it one of our deaths will likely involve a lot of meth a monster truck and a variety of illegal fireworks and the other death will be Kid Rocks and Qatar will argue that they have made some significant labor reforms it's something that the head of their World Cup efforts has proudly bragged about if we look at the actions that the government has taken so far laws implemented and being applied as well the follow system has been dismantled both in terms of allowing for workers to change employers and at the same time also there was the exit permit system they couldn't leave where they couldn't leave without permission that has been dismantled as well look those reforms sound great and to an extent they are but they also have some major asterisks on them workers in Qatar have said that they are still required to get permission from their current employer before they can move to a new job and have also experienced retaliation from their employers when they try to leave but also the reforms that he's bragging about there only began to be implemented in 2018 when much of the hard work was already done so he is bragging about dismantling the kafala system while sitting in a Stadium built using it the only way that pat on the back could have been more hypocritical is if he'd forced a migrant worker to do it for him in a 120 degree Heat but incredibly it's not just Qatar bragging about the progress that's been made FIFA has had the nerve to claim credit for it too all the changes that have happened in this country in terms of Human Rights and workers rights and so on human rights would not have happened or certainly not at the same Speed without the projectors of the World Cup oh corruption Caillou that out of a claim there because you cannot possibly argue FIFA deserves credit here FIFA's evaluation of qatar's bid had literally zero mentions of Human Rights or demands for labor reforms think of it like this if the country had made no changes to its Catholic system in the past few years and instead had passed a law called the doubling down on slave labor Act of 2019 you know what would have happened the World Cup still would have kicked off in Qatar today isn't that right live wink if you agree yeah I knew it I knew you knew what was going on there when FIFA awarded Qatar the World Cup there was only one way those stadiums were getting built and there was only one group of people who were going to do it and they gave them the tournament anyway and that is not the only troubling thing that they had to have known back then because let's take a moment to talk about qatar's human rights situation and I recognize every country has human rights issues including this one for more on that see every other story this show has ever done but Qatar is in some ways Next Level women there have very limited rights they need permission from their male Guardians to marry work in many government jobs and travel abroad until certain ages also because sex outside of marriage is illegal pregnant women have to present a marriage certificate to receive prenatal care which I hesitate to even tell you about just in case the Supreme Court is watching this show tonight and getting any new ideas as for the LGBT community sexual conduct between men is criminalized and can result in seven years in prison and FIFA was not unaware of this set platter even joked about it just days after Qatar was awarded the tournament because when he was asked what advice he would give to gay fans who might want to travel to Qatar this was his fun response then I would say then that they should refrend from any sexual activities you know they say in comedy you can either punch up punch down or co-sign oppressive governments for a quick laugh while looking like the penguin went to Wharton and we all know which option he just chose there get set platter a Netflix special it seems like he's ready now Qatar has frequently repeated that everyone is welcome at this world cup including gay fans but as this gay Qatari man who was granted asylum in the U.S citing the dangers he faced there points out even if that is the case for the next four weeks it's a hell of a blind eye to turn it's like having a household with children that are domestically abused and now you're gonna have a fancy dinner party people can can come in they can bring their kids their kids can jump on the table and they can do everything that they want the children that live there are going to be in the basement quiet behaving and they can jump on the table like the other kids that visited because they will be punished in that household for doing it well now you know that the children there are abused so how are you showing up to our home exactly the Qatari government is engaging in some truly horrendous behavior and we can't just gloss over that and uncritically put it in the spotlight it's an authoritarian regime not male Gibson by the way here's a fun game Guess how many movies he's been in this year you're wrong it's seven This truly has been the year of Mel and none of this the working conditions the oppression of women or gay people was a deal breaker for FIFA in fact qatar's authoritarian Tendencies may actually have been a deal sweetener because FIFA's long had a soft spot for autocrats and I'm not just saying that because they gave the World Cup to Russia in 2018 or went ahead with one in Argentina in 1978 when it was run by a military dictatorship or even that they held the second World Cup ever in Mussolini's Italy in 1934. they've said it themselves FIFA's former Secretary General Jerome Valk once said I will say something which is crazy but less democracy is sometimes better for organizing a World Cup when you have a very strong head of state that is easier for us organizers and even for a quote which is prefaced by I will say something which is crazy that is nuts but authoritarians are good for FIFA and FIFA is good for authoritarians as this critic points out Russia's World Cup four years ago was preceded by a lot of controversy and criticism but that's not what people remember about it what you saw in the run-up to 2018 was a lot of coverage of what was happening in Russia a lot of coverage of the rates abuses a lot of interest in that a lot of Engagement in it and I think what the Caterers will have noticed was how that all vanished as soon as the first whistle blew and I think everyone became captivated by the football the categories know that if they can just get to that first whistle then they're they're over the line it's true to be washed away once it begins and incidentally what a VIP box to be a part of there quick tip for the president of FIFA if you're gonna make arguments about how your organization is a global Force for good maybe try not to sit between Muhammad bin Salman and Vladimir Putin because you want a filling in a real sandwich there and the thing is that first whistle has now been blown Qatar played Ecuador in the opening game of the tournament earlier today so what now well workers like a niche hope that some of the athletes participating can help shine a light on all the exploitation that went into this event [Music] my message for Messi thousands of workers like me have worked on the stadium we did not get our salary our benefits I hope that if you talk about workers like us maybe we will get what we are owed I do not have much Faith but still I have hope yeah and that hope is pretty moving especially given all the reasons not to have any and I really hope that Messi hears that message though given that he plays for Paris Saint-Germain a team literally owned by the state investment fund of Qatar I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for him to criticize them people generally don't openly on their employers unless of course that employer is Warner Brothers Discovery in which case you can happily away because apparently they're too busy canceling shows to notice and and I will say some players to their credits have been speaking out Harry Kane and other team captains have said that they'll wear a one love armband during games and organizations from Australia's national team to fifth Pro the international players union have issued statements condemning qatar's treatment of workers women and gay people but ultimately it's not the players who are responsible for this mess it's FIFA they put the World Cup in Qatar and everything that's happened since then has been a complete disgrace and here's the thing I'm not saying that you shouldn't watch this world cup or be excited about it as tough as this is to admit I will be watching one of my greatest Joys is sitting completely alone in my living room and cheering on England until they're inevitably knocked out in the quarterfinals on penalties but let's try and make sure a line is drawn here because in a few weeks time the World Cup will be over the final whistle will be blown on December 18th in the stadium that a niche built in a city that didn't exist 10 years ago and FIFA will happily move on and while they will point to new human rights policies that they've now adopted we'll see how truly committed to those they really are especially given that one of the suitors to host the 2030 World Cup is rumored to be Saudi Arabia which also uses the kafala system and has an even worse human rights record than guitar look there is no reason to believe that FIFA will ever do the right thing but I would love it if it could for just once in its shitty history find a way to hold itself to the lofty ideals that it has the goal to profess I would love that as much as I love the World Cup itself and maybe just maybe even as much as David Beckham loves a taco because that would be Perfection for me

Channel: LastWeekTonight

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Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 20 2022