Human rights in World Cup country
The mendacious appearance between Fifa statements and brutal reality: RTL shows documentary about gays from Qatar
Video source: RTL.de
The LGBTQ+ community should also be welcome at the football World Cup in Qatar and queer people do not have to fear discrimination. An RTL documentary that is well worth seeing shows how brutally they are actually oppressed in the country.
At the end of the RTL documentary about gay men and their oppression in Qatar, Nasser Mohammed chooses a big metaphor to sum up the whole contradiction. Should one actually travel to a football World Cup in a country that so blatantly disregards numerous human rights? It’s not just about the up to 15,000 guest workers who toiled to death on Qatari construction sites for the construction of World Cup stadiums. It’s also about women’s rights and dealing with homosexuality. Same-sex love is punishable by up to seven years in prison in Qatar. Gays, lesbians and queer people are brutally oppressed in the emirate, while Fifa propaganda speaks of an “open World Cup for everyone”.
To clarify the situation, Mohammed compares the World Cup to a party to which one is invited. The celebration takes place in a house “where children are constantly being abused. Everyone can come and bring their children. Everyone can do what they want, even dance on the tables. Only the children who live in the house are downstairs in the basement and are not allowed to do anything, otherwise they will be punished. Now that you know that the children are being abused, do you want to come to the party?”
Conversations were only anonymous and top secret
Mohammed is believed to be the first Qatari to publicize his gay status. However, the doctor certainly lives in San Francisco in the USA and not in Doha, the capital of the emirate. Such sentences should not be uttered there in public, as the RTL documentary “Red Card Instead of Rainbows – Homosexuals in Qatar” vividly shows. The reporters Timo Latsch and Jonas Gerdes talked to gays from Qatar – anonymously abroad, about the men, who still live in Qatar, not to be endangered.
An “accurate picture of the queer community” in Qatar does not exist, the reporters report. Not even human rights organizations know about the scene, and there are no official state figures: “A lot is happening in secret.”
However, this much is known: the oppression of gays is commonplace and the testimonies of the witnesses confirm this in a powerful way. “We are very afraid of punishment and death, because what we learned again and again in our youth is that being gay is an aberration, not something natural,” says a 32-year-old about the situation in the Arab country. “It’s against God, against Allah, and society and the government fight us in very different ways. The police can theoretically show up at any time and take you to a secret place. They can use psychological and physical torture if they want. They confiscate all your personal belongings and search your phone, intimidate and harass you,” he said.
“Thank God this game happened”: National team of Ukraine celebrates emotional victory “for our country”
9 images
Trans woman describes police harassment
Faisal, a trans woman, describes the harassment upon entry and the arbitrariness of the border police: “Once I spent two days in a police cell because I’m supposed to have brought something into the country that they said was illegal. In the end they let me they sign me a false confession.” Once the police shaved her head.
The statements of the officials such as Nasser Al Khater, head of the World Cup organizing committee, sound all the more hypocritical in comparison to the brutal reality in the country and announcements like “The LGBTQ+ community is welcome” hardly sound credible. Fifa President Gianni Infantino (“Everyone is welcome, everyone is safe”) and ex-national coach Jürgen Klinsmann (“It’s going to be a gigantic World Cup”) can conjure up the ideal world of a football World Cup that is completely peaceful committed to international understanding. This has nothing to do with the reality of the queer community in Qatar.
It is to the credit of the RTL reporters that they spoke to Qatari gays for the first time, and not just about them. In this way, the idea of how great the suffering actually is becomes a little more concrete. Apparently, the statements also made an impression on Oliver Bierhoff, the manager of the German national team. Latsch and Gerdes also got him in front of the RTL camera. Bierhoff is thoughtful, even concerned, and one suspects that the closer the World Cup approaches, Bierhoff will have doubts: A World Cup in Qatar might not have been such a good idea after all.