What Qatar Doesn't Want the World to See | WORLD CUP 2022
it's a good song we found something in our reporting something happening here in the one big city in Qatar a place the whole world is looking at right now an invisible border drawn to trap human beings to make them work to make them build I want to show this to you so let me take you back to show you how we ended up sending a camera to someone and teaching them how to shoot undercover in Qatar while simultaneously capturing interviews in rural Nepal and how I ended up here staring for hours at Maps drawn by the Qatari government all of this to shine a light on something that Qatar doesn't want the world to see all of these have been emptied very recently [Music] hey I need to show you something I've been looking at maps of Qatar because the World Cup is going there when the world is going to be fixated on one place you got to look at all the maps I've been on the government website of Qatar looking at their zoning Maps this is the city of Doha the capital of Qatar but look at this the whole city is yellow and there's this one little shape of blue Doha Industrial Area I know we're talking about zoning I think something's up here I've been trying to map this like throw it on like my other tools to map it and see if there's like what this could be and it's not totally making sense it's kind of cut off from the rest of the city there's another municipality kind of in between it and Doha but it's a part of Doha usually when you have weird zoning like this there's something going on since guitar got awarded the World Cup in 2010 there's been all sorts of issues with their labor conditions and all of that and I think this has to do with that but I don't totally know the World Cup is happening in a few weeks I want to go to this place I need to reach out to Cami one of our research producers we're going to dive into this we're going to figure it out we're going to Doha folks hey Cami I want to go to Qatar before the World Cup to look at this one part of the city that's completely zoned differently I think it has to do with like the labor situation there I can't not print it I'm going there we have to find a fixer local producer someone on the ground who can help us not get arrested I will follow up tomorrow with more details going to guitar yes let's do it this sounds like a really great story I'll happily go to Doha with you I'll start researching right now I'm going to guitar congratulations I just want you to be smart I've been doing some research and I don't know how easy it's going to be for us to film places especially in the industrial area from what I've read They're notoriously not very kind to journalists the best part about the golf is that these cities are like so like cartoonish this is a hotel in freaking Doha look at this opening later this year can I stay in this hotel that looks like a freaking half pipe I've always wanted to do this I've never had an excuse still have fixer number one referred me to someone else so fingers crossed that Doha fixer number two is gonna work out drones yes do you think they'll let me fly my drone in uh Doha why NATO countries are helping out during anti-drunk stuff because they're afraid of you know terrorist drones coming in wait but what about just just drowning or sending out anti-drones wait what yeah okay not great news archic sir hasn't found anybody in the industrial area who wants to talk with us it's not looking likely that they're going to find anybody I'm going to keep trying to connect with anyone on the ground I think it's a hiding people thing I don't know but I'm trying to find a fixer to help me get in there you're gonna go in there yes I mean it's just it's not like some Secrets you're supposed to be living in a week and we haven't found any fixers we haven't found any people on the ground who could help us I'm just a bit concerned of our timeline right now [Music] I think we found someone a fixer who is deeply connected with the worker population in Doha and is potentially going to help us to get into the industrial area we're meeting with him on a call in a few minutes nice to meet you how are you doing Ryan let me switch off the AC did you get the proposal that we sent over we're not trying to get any secretive footage it's more just about life in the industrial area I guess my question for you is like if I went into an industrial era with my camera not a big crew but just my camera had to go film what what camera like this if I went into the industrial area with this camera and film another thing you know uh explain that what do you mean yeah you'll get undue attention from who do you think I would get under attention arms are controlled by generating forces and for example police so it's not very smart for me to go filming around in that area yeah okay and I think that's why we want to figure out a way it's my first time what do you think okay [Music] um this is not happening this is not happening it does if if we can't do the shots then this story doesn't work meaning I won't go to Doha so it's pretty important for us to know soon if this is feasible or if it's not feasible is can you um [Music] well it's really nice to meet you thank you so much for chatting I can't safely go into this Industrial Area like it's now clear to me like every fixer has just been like no this guy's just set up Point Blank he's like you're a white dude with a camera like this is this is not safe it feels like if you go you're just gonna what get shots of shiny buildings and not actually gain access yeah which I guess could be cool no I mean there's an option here where you try to find someone that could go in and then if we could get like a camera person in Nepal or Bangladesh or somewhere where workers have been and gone home we could totally tell this story The World Cup is literally a few weeks away I got some work to do the new plan find someone on the ground in Qatar we'll go into the industrial area and tell me why the hell the government is so afraid of of me going in with my camera [Music] before we continue I need to tell you about something which is that today's video is not sponsored by any brand sometimes we do really deep dives into complicated and sensitive topics it's hard to find a sponsor when we make stories like this I want to tell you about a way that you can support what we're doing if you're not interested in hearing this pitch from me that's totally fine so I'm gonna put a little bar down here on the bottom of the screen for the rest of you that are still here thank you and I want to tell you about The Newsroom The Newsroom is our community on patreon which is more and more turning into a place that I am very excited about journalism is changing and I'm making big bets that the type of Journalism that will succeed in the future is the type of Journalism that dives deep without the need for a journalistic institution to dictate what direction we need to go I want the story to guide me whatever 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countries migrate in to take lower paying jobs required to keep the economy growing construction Hospitality manual labor caretaking Food Services you know what I mean every rich country experiences this but in Qatar all of their neighbors were also getting super rich super fast so they started looking elsewhere for cheap labor and soon there was a flow of people taking these jobs but there's a tension here thanks to all this abundant oil and gas money the Qatari government provides a luxurious welfare state to their citizens free health care education guaranteed jobs subsidized housing and literally they just get paychecks for being Qatari for winning the fossil fuel jackpot so Qatar needed labor from other countries but they didn't want to let these immigrants in on the Sumptuous benefits of their welfare state so they started using this system where employers could sponsor workers to come to Qatar to work they wouldn't be citizens or anything close to it they would be totally at the mercy of their employer this was called the kafala system and it was the foundation upon which Qatar built its country [Music] the winner is Qatar so this is giant moment it's I mean I made a whole video about how this happened I'm not going to go into it but the fact is that as soon as Qatar won the World Cup they had a lot of work to do because their country didn't have a lot of infrastructure basically any infrastructure at all to host this thing so wait why were they chosen to host the World Cup if they didn't have an infrastructure it's a long story again I made an entire video about it the fact is they needed to build a bunch of stuff in a very short time so what they basically did is just ramp up the system that they already had importing tons of Labor from South Asia and Africa to come build their country in this case to build infrastructure for the World Cup [Music] so yeah I've been deep in the context in the history and the data for all of this the stuff I can do from the office but the fact is time is running out I need to find someone on the ground someone in Doha someone in Bangladesh or Nepal who can help me capture what is actually happening in these places talk to the people there I've been planting lots of seeds and some of them are starting to sprout so we're getting closer we're getting closer hey I've been talking with a journalist in Nepal who's really great and can connect us with workers who've returned home he's done a lot of work on this and he can go out and shoot these interviews I finally just settling into the fact that I'm not going to Doha and I'm disappointed in that because I wanted to be on the ground I wanted to see this issue but the right choices to use those resources to engage camera people to go capture the right stories in different parts of the world and that's what we're gonna do luckily I've got Instagram I also have miso soup hey Sandra um thanks so much for reaching I really appreciate it I'm doing this deep dive on the world cup and put a call out for people in Doha to help me out here I was gonna be going to Qatar and it's going to be there next week and I'm not going and now looking for people on the ground to help me and as always a bunch of people responded I live in a world where I can just ask for things and there's such a supportive Community who wants to help with these stories which is just an amazing reality probably 15 20 hours over the next two weeks getting some shots can I officially you know hire you as a contractor to do this and again all of this is 100 Anonymous we will make sure that you everyone is safe Bingo yes yes yes I am talking to somebody in Qatar who is a journalist who wants to help me out is excited oh my God I feel so much better there was someone in Doha who has camera skills with language skills because journalism skills who's excited to help and is just ready to go oh my gosh nice to meet you hello how are you doing yeah everything is great really appreciate you just like harnessing the the energy on this and just being super down and they have access to the industrial area yes I want you to tell me how comfortable you feel about this process in terms of Safety and Security what's sensitive what's not just give me an overview of where some red lines are here I found someone in Doha who I could give a camera to to film we're gonna call him Raj we won't be showing his face we'll change his voice because he could get in deep trouble for this first things first everything is monitored or like obedience works everywhere in this country no matter where I film I'm also being filmed specifically come to an industrial area there are a few layers to what we can do and what we cannot do and over the next several weeks of talking to Raj I realized that my fixation on this one blue square isn't actually the full story it's just the beginning I plan to go on every street and film from inside the car and I think that's the safest way to film and get like the value of what is implied to get inside the city we have someone on the ground with a camera that we bought them I've lined them out on how to shoot undercover I actually wanted to ask you like how do you get along shooting footages without getting loaded the key to filming without being seen is to look elsewhere you're holding this thing like you're holding a an ice cream cone you're walking around and you're looking elsewhere and then you just smoothly you know put it away and you just get really comfortable with turning on and off they're going to the industrial area they are very very cautious for a very good reason I would like you to shoot in 60 frames a second I'd like you to shoot in 4k this is going to be an amazing story if we can pull it off the government of Qatar is way more insane than I expected and we're going to take a lot of precautions to keep everyone safe we're going to show the world what Qatar doesn't want the world to see so I'm taking them over [Music] it should be like one and a half hour right Raj was finally heading to the industrial area to show us exactly what this place was but it wasn't until we heard from the people who had worked there and lived there that we began to see how deep this trap really was today is the day in Nepal A Million Miles Away they have been shooting interviews look these are people who actually worked on the World Cup stadiums and are now back home in Nepal you start to get to the human side of it and it becomes way less theoretical it's way less about these zoning maps and stuff and it becomes about real humans and this is where it starts to get heavy foreign [Music] [Music] as we've been setting up all these Logistics and figuring all of this out we've also been reporting and investigating the bigger context here the industrial area this little blue shape on the map is actually just one of several mechanisms that the Qatari government uses to bring people over to their country to trap them there and then to exploit them to work to build all the things they want them to build let me show you okay so it's 2010 Qatar just won the World Cup big they have to build an unfathomable amount of infrastructure in a very short time they do this by paying a bunch of people to go to these countries to small villages in places like Bangladesh and Paul to recruit a bunch of workers to come to Qatar to build and this is the first phase of what I'm calling the guitar trap because it is here where these workers were told they had to pay a recruitment fee usually like one to four thousand dollars just to like get recruited to go to Qatar and work these people don't have one to four thousand dollars lying around so they often would borrow money from family or take out a loan with really high interest rates so even before they start working they start their relationship with work and Qatar with debt so now you have workers from Bangladesh India Nepal all over this region flooding into Qatar to start building as this is happening Qatar implements a law this is a law that's meant to protect families okay the law says that worker groups are not allowed to live within quote family areas in the city of Doha it's a little ambiguous well the government later clarified that what they're referring to is Bachelors people in the Qatar that are single men okay so these Bachelors can't live in family zones where are these family zones that Bachelors can't live in is it just like one little part of the city no to clarify they released a map it looks like this everything in yellow is a family Zone a place where Bachelor workers are not allowed to live if you project it onto like a real map you will see that this is the entire city basically and then they reserved one little plot of land a city away still zoned for Doha this little blue shape where these Bachelor workers can live oh but they made a few exceptions anyone who works at like markets and barber shops restaurants oh and white collar professionals who are Bachelors can also stay in the family zones so really these working Bachelors is just a euphemism for guys who look like this guys who are there doing construction who Qatar does not want to see in their shiny downtown area so they reserved them a spot out here in the desert next to the sewage Pond this is the map that sent me down the rabbit hole and now I see it for what it is I knew something was up I looked at a bunch of these zoning Maps they're using this to put the people that they don't want to see in the places that will never be seen so now these guys are already Laden with debt because of the recruiting fees and now they're relegated and trapped into this part of the city the part of the city that I was not allowed to go to without getting arrested this is where Raj is on his way to this is where we're getting footage from here these kind of accommodations where workers live this is one of those buses that the workers that live in the initial area used to commute today is Friday and it's a Leisure day for a lot of workers as you can see a lot of clothes that have been washed and left in the sun to be dry this is the industrial area it's the thing I've been thinking about for a very long time and I'm finally seeing the footage from inside and I have to say it's not anything super surprising this is kind of anticlimactic in the sense that I'm just looking at like a kind of Dusty dilapidated part of town with a bunch of buildings that look the same and yet I now know a lot more about what this place represents look at this the industrial area isn't just far away it's completely cut off here's the Metro System brand new that they were planning to build for the World Cup this is the whole system connects all of the stadiums in the city you can see that they planned a couple of these lines to go out to the industrial area this would connect the industrial area to the city and yet these lines aren't actually built they're going to start on these right after the World Cup is over so yeah this place is just like completely disconnected I think I now see that and it's not just disconnected unintentionally this is very systematically intentionally disconnected from the rest of the city our interviews in Nepal gave us some clarity on what it's like to live out there [Music] the next phase of the Qatar trap has to do with how these people were exploited how their rights were taken away from them to force them to work to build the World Cup these workers were forced to work in very horrible conditions look at the temperatures in Doha in the summer getting close to 50 degrees Celsius close to 120 degrees Fahrenheit they literally have air-conditioned outdoor spaces look at that air conditioning outside on Wheels the stadiums themselves will have air conditioning and if these workers are out there doing like manual labor in this heat is foreign a lot of workers report being treated like animals being yelled at and bossed around in totally inhumane ways foreign Behind These Walls the conditions that these people were made to live in and really given no choice on where they could live are horrendous journalists and human rights organizations have actually gotten cameras back here to actually show what that looks like the Heat and conditions got so bad for some workers that they never returned home [Music] foreign foreign [Music] thousands of totally healthy young men died while working in these conditions we'll likely never know the true cause of death because instead of a real investigation the Qatari authorities come out and use these vague classifications like heart failure and natural causes as the cause of death doing this robs the family of answers on why their loved one came home in a box [Music] thank you [Music] so if these employers are so bad why don't these employees just change jobs the answer is they can't for a long time legally they couldn't because the next part of this trap has to do with paperwork [Music] oftentimes this paperwork would stipulate that these workers can't change jobs without the permission of their employers so the status of these workers who were trapped in their little blue box on the outskirts of the city was completely at the mercy of their employers if they left their job they would be considered a foreign immigrant illegally there and could be arrested and put into jail just one more layer of the Trap and then there was the fact that these employers would often not pay their workers for months at a time withholding wages from them and thus increasing their leverage and power over them and with no recourse these workers couldn't do anything about it so yes we're now talking about forced labor with no compensation a euphemism for modern day slavery I know that sounds dramatic but that's literally what is happening here not to all workers there were workers who had great conditions and got paid on time but this system enabled firms to so deeply exploit workers because it gave them so much power over them and so little recourse for these workers to complain or do anything without being punished or arrested so with no other options some workers turned to their last resort protesting foreign [Music] don't be fooled here this wasn't some worker Uprising this type of thing is illegal in Qatar an authoritarian police state where assembly like this is totally not okay so what happened is the police would show up squashy's protests tell them that everything was going to be okay and they would get paid and then deported a huge number of these people got them out of the system so that the status quo could remain just dehumanizing people that belong to a certain race and are brought here for certain purposes is not justified by any means thanks to International scrutiny Qatar started to make some reforms I realized this wasn't going to fly if they were going to host the World Cup so they started instituting things like worker hours that were not in the heat of the day mandatory water on site so these people could stay hydrated a minimum wage changing the law so that people could technically change jobs without permission compensating families for people who died working all of this looked great on paper but human rights organizations like Amnesty International actually have looked to see if those policies have trickled into reality and you know what I'm going to say they haven't this is walls and don't people live here as well [Music] so yeah I really understand now what this little blue box is for what it represents the authorities in Doha are getting ready for this world cup and as the event approaches they are making sure that anyone who belongs in this box stays in that box okay this is insane the timing of this this is literally happening right now been wiped out by some weird phenomenon I just got a message from Raj that um they are evicting workers from the city people who are living in the yellow area illegally because of the law are being evicted it's a couple weeks before the World Cup and so the timing is not surprising that they are cracking down almost everywhere yeah everything looks like it has been done really quick officially catching people and putting them into Shanaya which is the initial area I'm trying to get footages of them being evicted because a lot of them are being evicted like just with two hours of notice that's what I'm trying to do now this is so clear to me what's happening they're clearly starting to really enforce this like family zoning thing to get anyone who they don't want to be seen out of the center of the city I've never done a story like this before this is developing like day by day and all of this reporting that we've done I'm now seeing it play out in in real time as the city prepares for the world cup using all of these laws to continue to hide these people to get them out of view as all of these International visitors prepare to come it feels so empty and it's only the small houses that have been evacuated okay well we got to the bottom of it we know why this exists the way it's drawn what it means who it's for what it's meant to do I did not expect that I know what's happening behind those walls how those people are trapped how their families miss them and how some of them might never come home foreign [Music] now let's be clear this happened well before the World Cup ever came to Qatar and what I fear is that once we all move on once these few weeks of playing football are over we'll forget about everything we saw the guitar will have no incentive to actually do anything about this and they'll go back to what they've been doing for decades deceiving these workers trapping them in their country exploiting them and then hiding them from View thank you [Music]
2022-11-27 07:07
