Doha: The Government Communication Office has denied claims by The Washington Post that some 1,200 workers on 2022 FIFA World Cup projects have died and another 4,000 are likely to lose their lives.
Referring to an article ‘The Human Toll of FIFA’s Corruption’ on May 27, the office said that the claims were untrue and asserted that after almost five million work hours on 2022 sites, not a single worker had died, Qatar News Agency reports.
The office said in preparing the report, it appears the Post took the total annual mortality figures for Indian and Nepalese workers in Qatar and multiplied them by the years between now and 2022 — a calculation which assumes that the death of every migrant worker in Qatar is related to work. Qatar has over one million migrant workers.
A study, ‘The Global Burden of Disease’ published in The Lancet in 2012 says more than 400 deaths might be expected annually from cardiovascular diseases alone among Qatar’s migrant population, even if they had remained in their home countries.
It is unfortunate that any worker should die overseas, but it is wrong to distort statistics to suggest, as the Post did, that all deaths in such a large population are the result of workplace conditions, the office said.
The article was accompanied by a dramatic graphic, which purports to compare imagined fatalities in Qatar with the number of lives lost during construction of venues for other international sporting events, including London Olympics, where only one worker had reportedly died.
A more accurate comparison according to the Post’s analysis would have also suggested that every migrant worker in the UK who died between 2005 and 2012 — whatever the job and the cause of death — was killed during construction of projects for 2012 London Olympics. The office sent a letter to the Post’s editor, challenging the article and the figures in the accompanying graphic. We received a reply stating that because the original article had appeared online and not in print, the Post would not be printing Qatar’s letter of complaint, the office said. While the Post may not deem its online articles to be worthy of rebuttal, enormous damage has been done to Qatar’s image and reputation by the online publication of the article.
In fact, the article, with fabricated numbers and inflammatory and inaccurate graphic, has gone viral, with almost five million views on Facebook and YouTube as of June 1. As a result of the online article, readers around the world have now been led to believe that thousands of migrant workers in Qatar have perished, or will perish, building 2022 facilities — a claim that has no basis. In our view, misinformation in the article has damaged more than the image of Qatar; we believe it has also damaged the Post’s reputation for fair and accurate reporting. With that in mind, we have requested an immediate retraction of the article by the Post and a correction of misinformation it contains, the office added. The Peninsula
