Streets black with people, the national flag in the crowd: it's a day of celebration in Doha.
At the beginning of December 2010, Qatar has just won the organization of the 2022 Football World Cup. More than ten years after that hot night in the Qatari capital, The Guardian is doing the accounts: the British newspaper, 6751 foreign workers are died in the country, i.e. at least 12 deaths each week since the award of the organization of the competition.
To host the World Cup, Qatar had worked hard as soon as the award was announced.
Eight stadiums are to host the various meetings, and seven were to be built entirely.
But beyond these infrastructures, it is a bigger program than expected in Qatar with new roads, a metro network, new buildings for offices, housing and hotels, an enlarged airport ... If the use of workers foreigners is not a new phenomenon in Qatar - they represent around 90% of the population - more and more of them are taking part in the work: in 2012, the International Labor Organization estimated the need for labor. to 1 million new workers.
However, the Guardian's death toll could be underestimated.
It only concerns nationals of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, whose authorities have provided figures on the number of their nationals who have died in Qatar.
None, however, could be donated by the Philippines and Kenya, whose compatriots represent a significant part of the contingent of foreign workers.
"Without precise data from Qatar and the countries of origin of the workers, it is impossible to know the real extent of the number of workers who will have lost their lives for the country to host this World Cup", deplores the Parisian May Romanos, Gulf researcher for the NGO Amnesty International.
Very unclear circumstances of death
Beyond the number of deaths, the blur hangs over their circumstances.
69% of Indian, Nepalese and Bangladeshi worker deaths are classified as "natural".
“Workplace accidents” account for just 7% of all deaths, according to Guardian figures.
And the British newspaper to tell that on several occasions, he faced a "lack of transparency" and "inconsistencies".
"When a migrant worker dies in Qatar, it is too often attributed to
natural causes
or
cardiac arrest
, without proper autopsies or investigations being conducted to determine the real cause," confirms May Romanos.
It is therefore very difficult to get a clear picture of what is happening in the country and to determine precisely whether a death is work-related.
"
Not all of these disappearances took place during the construction of a stadium for the World Cup and do not always concern the people who work there.
According to Amnesty International, only 2% of foreign workers work directly on World Cup projects such as stadiums.
But these deaths come in a context: that of an intense workload with the transformation of an entire country for 2022, with a large influx of foreign workers, working in complicated conditions, under high temperatures.
Thus, The Guardian tells of the suicide of a Nepalese one week after his arrival, the electrocution of a Bangladeshi when water came into contact with bare cables, the discovery of the body of a 43-year-old Indian. on the floor in a dormitory ...
The authorities deny
Officially, Qatar only deplores 37 deaths linked to work on the stadiums, including 34 qualified as "not related to work".
In a statement sent to the Guardian, the Qatari government defeats the daily figures: "The death rate within these communities (
Editor's note
: foreigners
) is within the range provided for the size and demography of the population .
However, every loss of life is a tragedy, and no effort is spared to try to prevent every death in our country.
"
In Guardian, the organizing committee of the World Cup assured to have "always maintained transparency around this question", contesting "the inaccurate allegations concerning the number of workers died on our projects".
Fifa, she judges without providing figures that "the frequency of accidents on the sites of the World Cup was low compared to other major construction projects in the world".
This is not the first time that we have tried to carry out a count of the number of deaths around the organization of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
In 2013, already in the Guardian, the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that 4,000 workers would die before the competition even started.
A few months earlier, India had deplored the death of 700 of its compatriots in Qatar between 2010 and 2012. Qatar had recognized, for the first time, the death of a worker in October 2016.
Poorly respected reforms
Faced with international pressure, Qatar has launched a series of measures for foreign workers, including the possibility of leaving the country or changing jobs without the employer's authorization or the establishment of a salary. minimum.
But these reforms "remain little implemented, leaving thousands of workers at the mercy of unscrupulous employers who continue to exploit them with impunity", explains May Romanos.
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In a column published on Sunday, the boss of Fair Square, whose association intends to set up this year a count of the dead in Qatar in the face of the opacity of the authorities, was worried: the international and media pressure, which pushes Qatar to make a difference for foreign workers, "will she take her eyes off the ball after December 18, 2022, when the football spotlight shifts to North America?"
"