Sawsan Al Sha
The “organised campaign” launched these days by the Western media and international human rights organisations against Qatar in relation to the treatment of foreign labour reminds us of a similar crusade against the Kingdom of Bahrain in 2011.
The file’s name in Bahrain was “human rights,” and in Qatar it is “labourer’s rights.” In the end, there were many goals, but the blackmailing is the same. There were many files and the style of the organised campaigns is the same. Ironically, these organisations apparently prefer the month of May. I will describe the campaign against Bahrain that was executed in an orderly and systematic manner, and it was well funded. It was similar to the one Qatar is now facing.
After Bahrain’s events had subsided in May 2013, a group of ten people who called themselves the “Bahraini Press Association,” which is based in England, launched a systematic campaign that was paid for ($77,000) by the National Endowment for Democracy, a US organisation, to report about “Bahrain: silence is a war crime;” this was cited on the official website of the organisation.
Recently, the same scenario was repeated in Qatar, where the time of BBC’s story coincides with the release of the Amnesty International’s report on the issue of foreign workers in Qatar, which is not a coincidence.
The BBC’s story is summarised by Qatari authorities’ invitation to BBC’s observers and several other media outlets staff to check the progress it has made on the foreign labour file.
The Qatari government’s liaison office had invited 12 journalists to see the workers’ housing, as well as some of the new villages for workers, pointing out that journalists are free to interview whoever they wish to and walk around freely in the workers’ villages. However, the BBC crew insisted on a night tour of one of the workers’ villages to mistakenly trespass into a private property, which prompted arrest and interrogation.
The liaison office said that by doing so, the BBC crew trespassed into a private property, and like in many countries it is against the law of Qatar. The crew was brought before a public prosecutor, and then released after the completion of legal formalities.
There is no need to say that after this incident, Qatar has become the target of international organisations.
International human rights organisations, including the Arab Journalists Union issued a statement condemning the detention of journalists. The General Union of Arab Journalists has condemned Qatar’s detention of the BBC crew that was interrogated for two days.
The General Secretariat of the Union also demanded that Qatar respect the international conventions on the treatment of journalists and provide a natural environment for them to properly perform their work and not to resort to arrest, detention and interrogation; as well as doubting the intentions of journalists visiting the country.
Then comes the release of Amnesty’s report in the same month (what a coincidence) pointing out that Qatar, the FIFA World Cup host in 2022, is doing little to improve the situation of 1.5 million migrant workers in the country, despite promises of reform last year.
Mustafa Qadri, a researcher at Amnesty, told reporters: “Without immediate action, the commitments made by Qatar last year are facing a serious threat that appears to be a mere ploy of public relations gimmicks to ensure that the Gulf state can retain the right to host the 2022 World Cup.”
Although Qatar unveiled a reform plan nearly a year ago with proposals to change the laws relating workers to their employers and forcing them to request permission to change jobs or leave the country. It also included proposals to improve the working and living conditions of labourers.
However, the organisation says that FIFA has an obvious responsibility to put pressure on Qatar to work more!
This campaign is not only against Qatar. Therefore, confrontation must be within the Gulf through a unified GCC strategy with Gulf and international coordination. Surely, we should not leave Qatar to confront the soft powers alone. We should not also underestimate what these soft powers are doing to systematically target the Gulf States.
It is not beneficial for us to blame each other. Such an outlook does not go further than our feet. We have to go back to the pages of the past and look ahead to exploit all our capabilities to protect our interests.
The writer is journalist and author.
