Qatar silence over Australian women strip-search, labour exploitation and bulk investment in Turkey
By: Saad Rashid
Tags: Turkey, Australia, Qatar, Issues

Aisha Al-Qahtani, a Qatari resident who escaped her country for a better and a safer life in Britain sums up her native land’s treatment towards women in a line — “To be a woman in Qatar is criminal’. Her statement is not hard to believe especially after how Qatar treated various female passengers forcing them for intimate medical check-up without their consent to find out who was the mother of an abandoned child found in the airport bin. The issue caused global outrage exposing Doha’s insensitive dealing of the matter. But what surprised many was Qatar’s lack of regret for its actions.

Today marked two months to the episode of Qatari barbarity, which left many female passengers shaken, who were travelling on Qatar airways flight 908 to Sydney on October 2. Despite “grossly disturbing” and “offensive” treatment of women, Qatar did not reach out to the victims who went through the “sexual assault” to offer them an apology, let alone the compensation. Besides, the country did find the mother and father of the abandoned child, but there has been no coverage about what happened to both of them.

The Human Rights Watch rightly stressed that “The reported invasion of these women’s privacy is rightfully making headlines. But the circumstances that might have led a woman to leave the baby in the airport bathroom should be too.” It stressed that Qatar should not only disallow forced medical exams but also decriminalize sex outside of wedlock.

In a detailed statement, HRW said, “In Qatar and across the Gulf region, sexual relations outside of wedlock are criminalized, meaning a pregnant woman who is not married, even if the pregnancy is the result of rape, may end up facing arrest and prosecution. Hospitals are required to report women pregnant outside of wedlock to the authorities. Abortion is also criminalized with limited exceptions including that women must have their husband’s consent. Low-paid migrant women, like the more than 100,000 migrant domestic workers, in Qatar are disproportionately impacted by such policies.”

Qatar opted silence not only for its treatment of women but also over its treatment of migrant workers many of whom have been working without receiving their salary for months. According to a recent research conducted by the human rights group Equidem, many of Qatari companies failed to pay salaries to its workers since the coronavirus outbreak, summing the total outstanding amount close to “hundreds of millions of dollars”. As per the report, Equidem highlighted how Doha ignored the needs of thousands of migrant workers, as Qatari companies threw out their workers without any prior notice, or reduced their wages or kept them on unpaid leave, refused to pay outstanding salary and end of service payments, or forced them to pay for their own flights to return home.

The tiny oil-rich Gulf country conducted the “wage theft” of an unprecedented level, which left “worker after worker” hopeless, without enough money for food and basic necessities to sustain themselves or even without enough funds to send money home during the pandemic.

The country, where ninety percent of population comprise of migrant workers, i.e. around 2 million migrant workers — most of whom belong to south Asia — has a history of mistreating its workforce. In an another report put out by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, it was exposed that unpaid or delayed wages were mentioned by workers in 87% of cases of alleged labour abuse, which has impacted almost 12,000 workers since 2016. In Qatar, most of its migrant labour force has been enrolled in construction projects, most of which are related to the controversial 2022 FIFA World Cup projects.

Qatar has enough funds to pour in support of collapsing Turkish economy and for putting on a glittering glamorous front for the World Cup 2022 but not to pay the dues of poor workers or to provide basic facilities to its workers on humanitarian grounds. Last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, in Ankara, where the two leaders signed 10 deals, including Qatar’s huge investment purchasing 10 percent share in Istanbul Stock Exchange. As per the report, Qatari foreign direct investment in Turkey has multiplied to an astounding amount over the years from about 50 million dollars in 2011 to 570 million dollars in 2019.