12
Jan
2009
8 Comments
Al Jazeera
I have just been watching the news on Al Jazeera when suddenly a surprisingly social report was casted: Russia having to deal with sweated labourers! In the report they were severely criticising under which conditions and how badly paid labourers in Russia work. Isn’t that highly contradictorily for a News channel that is based in Doha, where people face the most terrible labourer laws (equal to no laws in favour of them at all), cannot establish any trade unions and have no rights whatsoever?
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Really great and important subject. Al Jazeera is funded almost entirely by the government in Qatar, hence why we will never in the history of the network’s existence will hear criticism of its ruling family, which like any other government in the region has its many faults, migrant labour abuse being one of them.
The only reason why so called “progressive” and foreign journalists are getting increasingly invloved is because they are extremely well paid and provided for.
It’s funny because Al Jazeera has produced many reports dealing with migrant workers, namely in the USA and Saudi Arabia. But never anything about their horrid experiences in Qatar itself.
Well, had you searched their youtube site, you would have known they have done several stories about labour abuses in the Gulf, especially in UAE. (I am talking about Al Jazeera English here).
AK, as I said in my comment, that’s not the point. Why do they ignore the migrant workers in Qatar specifically? They’re not in any better situation than the workers in the UAE, so why did they not once represent their plight?
Find me an Al Jazeera article that specifically mentions migrant worker abuse inside Qatar.
Well, I must admit that AK is right in saying that Al Jazeera English has casted a programme on migrant workers in the Gulf region, including Qatar, called ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’ (18 Aug 07).
Yet, now that these issues have been depicted by the mentioned channel why has none of the governments acted so far? The government of each of those emirates is extremely potent. After all it is a monarchy, be it an absolute (e.g. Saudi Arabia) or constitutional (e.g. Dubai) one. We should also not forget who owns Al Jazeera!
Is this merely a façade to make people believe in ‘Qatarian Heroism’? Can human rights be really fooled in that way? Personally, I find it very bizarre and incomprehensible but maybe there isn’t even anything to understand.
Because they benefit. Our economies here depend entirely on them. It’s not in any regional government’s interests to act upon the abuse or even try to limit it.
This is why other governments don’t collaborate – they just stop their citizens from coming here. The government of Sri Lanka is discouraging them from coming here and trying to get them to work in places like Europe instead, unfortunately most do not get such opportunities, so they settle for here, where they are not legally protected in any way.
Wow I can’t believe no one picked up on that. I meant to say UAE! Which next to Saudi Arabia has the worst record for migrant worker abuse, specifically construction workers and maids forced into human trafficking.
FYI a bunch of people are documenting their cases here.
Qatar also has a population the size of Boston’s (I don’t see many stories about Bahrain either), wheras Saudi’s is 27 million. That said I have my problems with AJE too, but there isn’t a single media outlet that doesn’t have any blindspots and bullshit, no matter how much they claim to strive for objectivity. To be fair the UAE gets a very disproportionate amount of coverage in the Western press as well, maybe because of the strikes there that drew attention to it.
In Al Jazeera or in general? There are tons, thousands, of stories about migrant workers in Bahrain these past few years. In the local English Daily (Gulf Daily News) there’s stories about abused migrant workers almost every other day – we use it very often as a resource for such news here. They do a great job because they have journalists from the area but sometimes locals report on it too.
ArabNews.com also does a lot of coverage on migrant worker issues.
It’s not so much about reporting as it is about society actually doing something about it. They are aware, but silent. They have accepted this as a norm, many are convinced that migrant workers really are second class citizens.