By Armin Rosen From Business Insider

The US Department of Justice’s charging documents against 14 individuals accused of bribery and racketeering in conjunction with their roles at FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, barely mention Qatar.

Nevertheless, the accusations don’t reflect well on the oil- and gas-rich Persian Gulf monarchy that won the rights to host the 2022 World Cup.

If the allegations made by DOJ prosecutors are accurate, the hosting rights for the 2010 World Cup, the 2011 FIFA presidential election, and a number of South American soccer tournaments were tainted by nearly $150 million in bribes. It’s difficult to believe that Qatar’s World Cup bid was any cleaner than the rest of the apparently sordid day-to-day business of FIFA.

Indeed, a 2014 report from former US federal prosecutor Michael J. Garcia found certain FIFA officials were paid $1.5 million each to vote to award Qatar the tournament. FIFA suppressed the publication of Garcia’s report, and the organization’s only response to the mounting evidence of an illicit sale of the 2022 bid has been to insist Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup will not be revoked or even reassessed.

It is possible Qatar’s hosting rights will be able to weather the most intense legal scrutiny to which FIFA has ever been subjected. FIFA is obviously loath to strip the Middle East of its first World Cup — if the soccer world’s sanctioning body is willing to hold the 2022 tournament during the European club season and tolerate widespread labor abuses during the event’s preparations, it seems unlikely its plans will be swayed by accusations that haven’t even made it to a courtroom yet.

At the same time, the arrests fit into a larger trajectory for the Gulf emirate. Qatar once represented a fresh alternative to the traditionally staid and stability-minded governments of the Persian Gulf. The Qatari monarchy built Al Jazeera into the most important media force in the Middle East, often shattering the region’s state-held monopolies on the flow of information. During the Arab Spring, Qatar supported entities like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda, betting that the opening of the Middle Eastern political space that started in 2011 would result in a wave of elected Islamist governments.

Outside the Middle East, Qatar hosted peace talks over the future of Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region, attempted to broker agreements between the pariah state of Eritrea and its neighbors, and agreed to host the political office of the Afghan Taliban. Qatar attempted to make itself politically indispensable through maintaining relations with terrorist entities and pariah states — while also hosting Al Udeid Air Base, one of the most important US military installations in the Middle East.

That balance hasn’t exactly held.

The fall of the Muslim Brotherhood governments in Egypt and Tunisia dealt a blow to Qatar’s prestige, while Al Jazeera was essentially expelled from Egypt over Qatar’s support for the Brotherhood. Qatari officials are widely accused of supporting Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Nusra head Abu Muhammad al Jawlani granted a rare exclusive interview to Al Jazeera Arabic on Wednesday). The peace in Darfur hasn’t held, and Al Jazeera’s expansions into the US and Turkish markets have floundered.

Qatar’s World Cup bid was once an unmistakable sign that Qatari hard and soft powers were one of the major emerging forces on the global scene. The decline of the public’s perception of the Qatari World Cup, now considered an ill-gotten humanitarian catastrophe, has mirrored the drift in the country’s standing more generally.

Wednesday’s FIFA arrests further suggest there was never any sustainable policy undergirding Qatar’s unorthodox and outsize global ambitions. The controversy over the bid is the end result of the world’s misplaced hope that the apparently pro-American, peace-minded, Al Jazeera-broadcasting regime in Doha would be able to deliver on its desire to be an influential and constructive player on the world stage.

The World Cup bid may have delivered the tournament to Qatar, but with these serious allegations, the games will not necessarily come with the prestige the country once hoped for. Instead the tournament will only expose how unready Qatar was to become a serious global player, and how badly the rest of the world misjudged it.

IMAGES:
Qatar World CupREUTERS/Francois LenoirMembers of Qatar’s delegation in Zurich on December 2, 2010, after the announcement that Qatar would be host nation for the FIFA World Cup 2022.
Egypt President Mohammed MorsiAPQatar made a bad bet on the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, which was overthrown in summer 2013. And the country’s problems haven’t ended there.

For more on this story go to: http://www.businessinsider.com/todays-fifa-arrests-show-how-far-qatar-has-fallen-in-the-past-5-years-2015-5#ixzz3bS14z22o

Related:

What’s happening with FIFA?

From Sarah George – WALK FREE.ORG

Could this be our chance to get FIFA to take slavery in Qatar seriously? The organisation is under intense scrutiny: several officials have just been arrested on corruption charges and the football body is about to elect its President. It’s vital we really keep the pressure up while the world’s attention is once again on FIFA.

Please help us make the most of this opportunity: call on FIFA to help end slavery on Qatar 2022 World Cup construction sites.

Just a few weeks ago the Qatar World Cup once again made headlines for all the wrong reasons as news emerged that BBC journalists had been arrested for investigating the treatment of migrant workers on Qatari construction sites. Journalist Mark Lobel had just spoken to an 18-year-old man who was trapped under the kafala system, receiving virtually no salary, when he was arrested and interrogated.1

The Qatari authorities have much to hide. Under the kafala system, thousands of migrants are trapped in dangerous and sometimes deadly living and working conditions, for little or no pay — all to build stadiums for the World Cup.2

Now is a crucial moment to pile the pressure on FIFA. The organisation is investigating why these journalists were arrested, battling with its own criminal allegations and its presidential election is imminent. Call on FIFA to take a stand against modern slavery in Qatar now at: http://www.walkfree.org/fifa-play-ball/?utm_source=Subscribers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fifa-play-ball&utm_content=FIFA_EmailTarget_Chaser_en_Prospect_N-AT_Ex_28May15

Migrant workers in Qatar are living, working and dying in modern slavery to bring the world the 2022 World Cup. FIFA must use its influence over Qatar to improve the working conditions for these workers.Squalid, overcrowded accommodation. Brutally long days working in the blistering heat. Regular abuses of rights such as having passports withheld or being lied to about the nature of promised work.1

This is the everyday reality for migrant workers in Qatar helping to bring us the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Worse still, recent reports show that workers from Nepal and India are dying in record numbers on Qatari construction sites since the country won its World Cup bid.2

FIFA has pledged to do more to improve the “unacceptable” situation for workers on World Cup-related projects,3 but these words have yet to be followed by action.

Call on FIFA to take responsibility for awarding the World Cup to a country with historic issues of worker exploitation and forced labour. FIFA President Sepp Blatter must use his influence over World Cup organisers to ensure all future World Cups are slavery free, including Qatar as a top priority.

FIFA should:

Call for an end to the exploitative kafala system in its current form in Qatar, specifically by allowing workers to freely change jobs and leave the country without their employer’s permission.
Demand that fundamental labour rights are protected as a requirement for countries to be selected to host World Cups.
Call on the Qatar 2022 organising authorities to establish a complaints mechanism that allows migrant workers to report abuses and secure justice.

SOURCES

1. http://www.ituc-csi.org/qatar-response-to-labour-rights ↩
2. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/18/qatar-world-cup-india-migrant-worker-deaths ↩
3. http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/qatar2022/media/newsid=2227055 ↩