FIFA. Qatar. Nepal.

The three make an odd trio and the principal players in a super-scandal combining the cream of European corruptocrats, a Mideast sheikdom and as many as a million workers from Nepal and elsewhere.

In perspective, Nepal’s horrifying earthquakes killed 8,699 people, the Central Police News Room of Nepal said today, June 1, 2015. World Cup construction probably won’t kill more than about 4,000.

But an earthquake is an impersonal force, unlike the forces in Qatar killing workers from Nepal and other nations by the thousands.

These forces could only be human in origin. Earthquakes don’t act out of greed, negligence and rapacity.

Zurich, Switzerland-based FIFA, the world football/soccer federation, today is best known for the May 27 indictments of nine of its officials and five corporate executives on charges including racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering.

The crux of the charges stemmed from FIFA’s awards of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and of the 2022 games to Qatar.

At the other end of this ruthless food chain, a couple of reports have documented the probability that thousands of foreign workers will die in the run-up to the World Cup.

The Guardian newspaper last December reported that in 2014 Nepalese workers died at the rate of one every two days, and that 964 workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh perished in 2012 and 2013.

These are unheard-of construction fatality rates—unheard of at least since the construction of the Panama Canal ended in 1913.

The International Trade Union Confederation sent a delegation to Qatar in 2014.

“Poor migrant workers living in squalor are forced to work long hours in unbelievable heat, six days a week,” said Sharan Burrow, ITUC general secretary. “Kept in an apartheid situation, they are dying in unprecedented numbers.”

Qatar has a relatively young ruler, Sheik Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who gained power in 2013 after his father abdicated.

For that or whatever reason, international pressure seems to be getting to Qatar.

The Sheikdom of Qatar fought back yesterday by sending out a former prime minister to speak to Fox News , Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani. The sheik blamed the media for Qatar’s problems, lamented the lack of coverage of Russia’s 2018 World Cup construction and played the politically correct card.

“Is it because (Qatar is) an Arab, Islamic, small country?” he asked. “That’s the feeling of the people in the region.”

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Author: David Lewis

Editor: Alli Sarazen

Photo: Wikimedia Commons