EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | There should be a bare minimum for moral decency, and Qatar is far below it

The first time I landed in Doha, Qatar, I was taken aback by an image I did not expect. Never in all my travels had I walked into an airport terminal so full of men.

It is foolish to pretend that sport, or extramural activities at school, cannot be weaponised by politicians. Which is why we have a duty to not be blind supporters of the beautiful game.

Even as a queer guy who loves social spaces filled with men, it felt weird. Weird, because this was not exactly a gay club in London’s Soho. Nor was I there for, uhm, Qatari Pride. And by “so many men”, I do not mean maybe 60% of people at the airport were men. The figure was easily — conservative estimate — 80% male.

Later I would learn Qatar has one of the highest proportions of men to women in the world.

The second striking feature of the same image is how emaciated so many of these men were.

I did not catch a glimpse of too many faces because most were sweeping or mopping the floors, or otherwise looking timid, and unless they were doing a job that requires human interaction, they cut forlorn, slender, scared figures.

A bunch of Oxford Debate Union friends and I were picked up in style and made our way to a posh hotel, where we were staying while working with the Qatar Foundation to develop learning materials to instil a debate culture in schools, both locally and internationally.

The idea was that the materials could be distributed and used widely. I was oblivious to the real structural and political realities undergirding the scene that greeted me at the airport.

The disproportionate number of men reflected the hundreds of thousands of migrants from the region who work there as cheap labourers. Their emaciated and forlorn expressions testified to the harsh conditions under which many were living, eking out paltry wages to send home while shieldingwives and children in Nepal, India or Bangladesh from the full truth of the lies sold by agencies that recruit labourers to build Qatar.

Only now that Qatar is hosting the 2022 Fifa Soccer World Cup is the world belatedly taking proper notice of the human rights cost that goes into the making of the architectural and aesthetic wonderland that is Doha.

Many people who arrive in Qatar simply render the workers invisible or, like me, briefly notice them physically but give no further thought to the narratives and horrid human truths that may lurk beneath the spotless airport surface.

It’s puzzling that there can be serious contestation around whether debates can examine, as one of the themes, the politics of a city or country that wishes to host a global sporting event.

We might disagree whether Qatar should be allowed hosting rights given legislation that criminalises homosexuality, but how can anyone — including defenders of Qatar’s hosting of the event — seriously suggest we cannot include critical questions about the laws of the land in the details of our hosting disagreement?

It’s a bit like a defence lawyer desperate to exclude crucial evidence from a trial without  showing why the evidence doesn’t entail his client’s guilt. Unless, of course, the “controversial” evidence does exactly that.

Which, I suspect, is precisely why some defenders of Qatar hosting the 2022 World Cup are desperately shouting, “Keep politics out of sport!” They do so, not because it’s a principle they hold dear and think of as a self-evident truth, but because they know the case for hosting the event falls flat quickly if “politics” enters the arena.

It belongs in the arena, however, because real human beings, including football fans, players and administrative staff, are affected by the legal and political structures in a host nation. It is fair to talk football and politics in one conversation, because sport is necessarily imbued with politics as a human and sociopolitical endeavour.

I think any country seriously implicated in gross human rights abuses should be denied certain privileges, such as the joy and opportunity to host a global sporting event that aspires, in part, to symbolically represent the best of humanity. We cannot credibly sloganeer about the beauty of the game of football and seeing the best of human athletic prowess and tenacity on display, on the one hand, and wilfully prop up a government that tramples on the human rights of workers and oppressed groups such as the queer community and women, on the other.

To do so is to be morally inconsistentat best and responsible for the continued manufacturing of state-sponsored harm and systemic oppression at worst. Fifa is guilty of exactly this in the case of Qatar.

One predictable response to this view is to query the human rights records of previous host nations, including democracies in the global north. This sort of response is partly fair but also short-sighted.

It is fair to always point out the extent of political and ethical hypocrisy.

Too many Western countries, and media and analysts from those regions, talk about places like Qatar as if their own regions are the gold standard of political decency. Far from it.

The corrupt nexus between money and the hosting of major sporting events is a shameful history that has played out mostly in the global north.

All states that act immorally should be condemned rather than us engaging in a table-tennis match of exchanging examples across the debating net.

What has happened in Qatar is blatantly shameful and more sharply analysed and reported on than other cases around the world.

Many in the West have a moral backbone when observing places like the Middle East or Africa but often turn a blind eye or see “complexity” in domestic instances of moral wrongdoing. This view is also short-sighted. If you think the US, the UK or Germany, for example, lack moral authority, then the correct response is not to emulate them but to lead the world by being the example of political decency.

Set your own benchmarks for political leadership. Failing to do so would be the equivalent of the democratic SA state excusing some of its state-aided violence against citizens by arguing that similar and even worse state-aided violence happened under the apartheid regime. That’s the wrong place to look for guidance.

Criticism of Qatar cannot be mitigated by trotting out examples of moral flaws of Western states. All states that act immorally should be condemned rather than us volleying debating points.

Besides, it is (literally) cold comfort to families in India, Nepal and Bangladesh to receive a corpse, no truth about the real cause of their death and the circumstances surrounding it, and zero compensation for lethal workplace injury. The bodies of these workers are treated as mere input, like cement, in the making of the various football stadiums.

I would rather we seek difficult consensus or near consensus on what counts as minimal moral decency than choosing the violent status quo.

How does pointing out the hypocrisy of the West help these families heal, to live materially now that the breadwinner is dead, to get justice and start attaining some form of closure?

The same goes for women and queer people who are second-class citizens in Qatar.

Sepp Blatter suggested gay fans simply abstain from sex during the World Cup. That is unfunny and an appalling endorsement of the rights to dignity and equality of gay people being sacrificed for the sake of sustaining football corruption. Because gay people are a statistical minority, we also only have small numbers of allies helping push back against the absurdity that giving up fundamental rights for a few weeks is not only reasonable but even necessary, as some sort of respect for the “culture” and sovereignty of a host nation. Here, again, we need to abandon poor Western examples of moral failure and set new, and rather obvious, baseline moral standards for hosting an event of this kind.

It should be non-negotiable that a country that criminalises homosexuality should not be allowed to host the football World Cup. It should also be non-negotiable that certain minimal international labour law standards must be in place, and be continuously monitored for compliance, by a country wishing to host the games.

We could debate what else should be non-negotiable. Yes, it will be hard to determine what should be regarded as minimal standards, but it is better to have a complex and messy debate, even if it drags on for a while, than to persist with the status quo, which is a guaranteed recipe for rights violations on a large scale.

I would rather we seek difficult consensus or near consensus on what counts as minimal moral decency than choosing the violent status quo.

Countries like Qatar accept that sport is political. Defenders are kidding themselves when even those they want to defend, such as Russia and Qatar, know sport is about money and politics.

The Qatar Foundation did not invite me and my Oxford Debate Union friends to the country because of some deep commitment to democratic theory. Of course not. The restrictions on media coverage, for example, are inconsistent with the values of parliamentary debate we focused on in the learning materials we produced. We worked with veteran broadcaster Tim Sebastian and, again, the Qatar Foundation knew the symbolic value of being associated with a master exponent of speech rights.

Qatar, it is now clear to me as a slightly wiser adult, used the brand of the Oxford Debate Union for strategic geopolitical purposes. The Qatar Foundation’s name and logo were juxtaposed with the credentials of a debate union synonymous with freedoms that actually are not alive in Qatar. Similarly, Qatar understands the geopolitical gains of hosting the World Cup.

It is foolish to pretend that sport, or extramural activities at school, cannot be weaponised by politicians. Which is why we have a duty to not be blind supporters of the beautiful game. That would be an ugly move. Avoid choosing indifference, and get stuck into the politics of this whole sporting mess we have co-created.