As the World Cup¹ begins in Qatar, the horrific atrocities against the immigrants who built the entire infrastructure for this event, have resurfaced in the news.

Since the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar by FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the international governing body of football (soccer), the murderous treatment of the immigrants who built everything has been chronicled in the press and online.

In early 2021, a Guardian article revealed that 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, had died in Qatar since the event was awarded to that country in 2010.² It is not known how many of these deaths were among migrants working on World Cup stadiums and other related projects. According to the Qatar government, 30,000 foreign workers were employed to build World Cup stadiums. The Guardian obtained this data from the countries of the migrant workers. According to Human Rights Watch, the total death toll is significantly higher, as these figures do not include deaths from a number of countries which send large numbers of workers to Qatar, including Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sudan, Uganda, and others. Deaths that occurred in the final months of 2020 were also not included in the data reported by the Guardian.³

With the summer temperatures over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Qatar, migrant workers were forced to work in horrendous conditions. Many of them died from unspecified reasons with death certificates that give vague reasons for their death—such as “acute heart failure natural causes,” “heart failure unspecified” and “acute respiratory failure due to natural causes.”⁴

Dr. Prakash Raj Regmi, cardiologist in Nepal, asks: How can a person, 20 years old, die naturally? He answers this by saying that with “this extreme atmospheric condition where the workers work the day long. It causes dehydration. It may cause heat stroke. It may cause massive dehydration, electrolyte imbalance. And this may lead to death. Sweating is a defense mechanism. It cools the body. But when the person is exposed to extreme hot climate for a long duration of time this mechanism, body mechanism, fails. The sweating cannot cool down the body. So the temperature of the body rises and this leads to several complications which may later on cause death. Death may occur immediately at the spot. Or it may occur several hours or days later.”⁵

Migrant workers were subjected to what amounts to “slave labor,” as was reported on ESPN’s E:60 show, Qatar’s World Cup, which aired on Sunday, November 6, at 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN and is now available for on-demand streaming on ESPN+. Jeremy Schapp, the host of the show, reported that foreign laborers in Doha, capital of Qatar, worked two shifts lasting 12 hours. One of the workers said that he was forced to go to Qatar because he could make more money than he could farming in his own country of Nepal. Schapp reported that hundreds of workers have reported that they were not getting paid. According to Schapp, these migrant workers had to have a Qatari handler in order to work in Qatar.⁶

Gaziur Rahman from Bangladesh came to Qatar in 2018. He had to take out a loan of $4,000 to enter the country. He said the “work is so hot breaking stones.” For the two years he worked in Qatar, he sent home only $880. The company he worked for would not allow him to transfer and withheld his pay. At one time, his work permit was revoked as were dozens of his co-workers. He was arrested for missing two days of work, and did not have his passport, as migrant World Cup workers’ passports were confiscated once they entered Qatar. He still owes more than six months salary to pay off debts he incurred in order to get to Qatar.

In a previous E:60 show in 2014, Trapped in Qatar, it was reported that migrant workers lived 20 miles outside of the capital in “appalling conditions”—12 men living in a room with poor sanitation. What Jeremy Schapp found in Qatar eight years ago led him to ask, “How many people are going to die?” We now know the answer.

The question to be answered is why? In short, it’s the workings of capitalism-imperialism. Bob Avakian writes that “the way human society has developed under the domination of this system of capitalism-imperialism has led to a highly ‘lopsided’ world, where billions of people in the world live in horrific conditions of oppression and misery, with millions of children in the Third World dying each year from starvation and preventable diseases.”⁷

He gets into this more deeply:

Imperialism means huge monopolies and financial institutions controlling the economies and the political systems—and the lives of people—not just in one country but all over the world. Imperialism means parasitic exploiters who oppress hundreds of millions of people and condemn them to untold misery; parasitic financiers who can cause millions to starve just by pressing a computer key and thereby shifting vast amounts of wealth from one place to another….⁸

This is what has happened to the migrant workers from the impoverished countries of South Asia and Africa, forcing them to go to Qatar, an oil rich country, in order to find work. Just think about this statistic. Qatar has a Qatari citizen population of 300,000 and an immigrant population of around two million—85 percent of those living in Qatar are immigrants, who are serving the remaining 15 percent. The three largest immigrant groups in Qatar are from India (698,100), Bangladesh (263,100), and Nepal (254,300), with those from Nepal considered as the most impoverished.⁹ The average salary for an immigrant in Qatar is anywhere from $250-$700 per month, while the average household income for Qatari citizens is over $20,000 month.¹⁰

Qatar is not an imperialist country, but it has amassed enormous wealth from gas and oil. It has the third-largest natural gas reserves and oil reserves in the world, and is one of the biggest exporters of natural gas. The U.S., the biggest and most dominant imperialist country in the world, is deeply involved in Qatar’s economy. In 2019, the U.S. invested $14.2 billion in Qatar and sent Qatar $6.5 billion worth of goods.¹¹ Since 2015, Qatar has invested $30 billion in the U.S. and plans to invest another $10 billion in U.S. ports.¹² Further, the U.S. has a military base, the Al Udeid Air Base, which is home to the headquarters of the United States Central Command (USCC) and the United States Air Force Central Command (USAFCC). The U.S. also has 3,500 troops stationed in Qatar. Qatar is an important country for the U.S. in its desire to dominate the Middle East, economically and militarily.

A PBS report gets into the details of what has happened to an immigrant worker, Anish Adhikari, who went to Qatar from Nepal in search of a higher income than he could earn at home. In order to be accepted in Qatar, Anish borrowed 200,000 Nepali rupees, just over $1,500, more than a year's salary in Nepal. About the conditions in Qatar, he said, “Sometimes, the company gave us rotten food. The fish would smell disgusting. It used to give us diarrhea… It got up to 125 degrees Fahrenheit. We didn’t get the water we needed. The water we got was almost 90 percent ice. We asked why they did that and told them it was impossible to drink water like that. They said they froze it because, if they provided normal water, the workers would drink more.”¹³

Quitting was not an option for Anish and others as they were trapped in their situation by the 36 percent interest on their recruitment fee loan and unpaid wages.

Despite the fact that Qatar pledged to reform the working conditions of the migrant workers, Mustafa Qadri, Chief Executive Officer, Equidem,¹⁴ explained that, in reality, immigrant workers were still being subjected to systemic abuse by the companies and officials in Qatar. “We interviewed nearly 1,000 workers over an 18-month period,” he stated. “There's a very clear picture that emerges. Workers who have built these stadiums for the World Cup have been subjected to forced labor practices, and some of the biggest companies in those projects actively hid those workers from the monitoring process…It's really clear that this is a tournament built on the back of forced labor…Narayan (who was also interviewed in this report) and Anish are not alone. There are thousands other workers like them, each owed thousands of dollars. We estimate, in total, up to about half-a-billion dollars of money.”¹⁵

This World Cup, that is soaked with the blood of immigrants, shows that capitalism-imperialism is long outmoded and must be ended. It must be swept away.¹⁶