Tuesday, November 5, 2024

World Cup: Qatar’s human rights record dominated headlines. Why’s USA rampant gun violence not getting same global attention?

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All her dreams of graduating with a degree and becoming one of America’s most decorated gymnasts ended abruptly on the night of August 30, when she was shot dead by her boyfriend Chad Richards. Richards, who has since been charged with first-degree intentional homicide, shot her eight times with a black gun.

Welsh’s death did not just cut short an auspicious career, but also plunged the victim’s family and an entire community into depression. The university had to offer counselling to its gymnastics team and coaches after they were informed of the tragic death of their colleague in-person.

Welsh’s younger sister, Kaeli, was inconsolable when she spoke at a hearing. “She [Kara] was the strongest person I know, both physically and mentally,” a deeply emotional Kaeli said while wiping tears from her eyes. “She had so much more to give the world than gymnastics.”

Indeed, Welsh had a lot to give to the world. And there are thousands of people like her who have lost their lives in a similar fashion due to the spate of gun violence in the United States.

America has had a gun violence problem for decades, although many are reluctant to admit it. But with the country set to be one of three host nations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this epidemic of gun violence can no longer be overlooked.

The World Cup is meant to be a celebration of football, but the safety of fans should always come first. Nobody should travel for a tournament anywhere and not return home in one piece.

By design, America as a country has encouraged its citizens to love guns, having struggled to draw a line between freedom and absurdity. The US Constitution’s Second Amendment backs “a well-regulated Militia” as being necessary to the security of a free State and stipulates that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

To this end, even as America continues to struggle with mass shootings and incidents of gun violence, the majority of its citizens believe the solution is to possess more guns. Laws concerning the minimum legal age required to possess a gun remain lax and grey.

While persons below 18 are prohibited from owning handguns under federal law, there is no minimum age for owning a shotgun or rifle. In fact, it’s technically legal for a child to possess a long gun in 30 states in the US.

In Arizona, just three days before Welsh’s boyfriend emptied eight bullets into her neck, a nine-year-old girl accidentally killed a shooting instructor. How did she even get close to a gun? The instructor, Charles Vacca, was teaching her how to use a high-powered submachine gun when the recoil from the automatic fire caused her to lose control of the Uzi and she ended up shooting the instructor in the head.

But why should a nine-year-old be handling guns instead of reading books or watching anime movies? Back in 2008, a similar incident saw an eight-year-old boy tragically lose his life after accidentally shooting himself in the head during a gun expo in Massachusetts.

“If dad wants to give his son a rifle or a shotgun on his 13th or 14th birthday, he’s pretty much free to do that in most states,” the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, Daniel Webster, said earlier this year.

“The laws aren’t designed in essence to protect children from accidental shootings of this nature. There’s a mindset that’s fairly prevalent in the U.S. that there’s nothing wrong with kids firing guns.”

For many Americans, holding a gun has become a sport so fun that they entertain themselves and their children through shooting. But if anyone is allowed to possess a gun, including children, what’s to stop them from barging into a stadium and firing into the crowd? It might sound outlandish but the many documented cases of mass shooting in America prove it’s not far-fetched at all.

December 2, 2010 – The day Qatar was announced as host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Representatives from all 208 FIFA Member Associations at the time attended the 2010 FIFA Congress at the Haus des Sports Center in Zurich, Switzerland, as the decision to host the world for the first time in the Middle East was made.

Qatar won the bid over Australia, Japan, South Korea and the United States, recording 14 votes against the United States’ eight in the final round of voting.

However, before that, the small Arab country was criticised for not having adequate facilities and being ‘too hot’ in the summer, when the tournament is usually hosted.

Nonetheless, it won the bid despite growing concerns of human rights abuses and violations.

Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter said he was “happy” the tournament was going to the Middle East but later confessed to regretting the decision.

“Qatar is a mistake,” he told the Swiss Newspaper Tages Anzeiger in November 2022. He then added that FIFA changed its rules in 2012 as Qatar’s human rights record was constantly questioned: “Since then, social considerations and human rights are taken into account.”

As the country sped up the construction of stadiums, hotels and transport systems to meet the infrastructure requirements to host the tournament, the spotlight again was on how migrant workers, who made up about 90% of the workforce according to Amnesty International, were being treated.

An Amnesty International report six months after the tournament found that many people who were hired as security officials and marshals were “still being denied justice for the abuses they suffered despite FIFA and the hosts Qatar being warned that they were especially vulnerable to exploitation and workers raising complaints and protesting about their treatment.”

Likewise, a 2023 Human Rights Watch study found that FIFA and Qatari authorities failed to compensate migrant workers for abuses such as strange deaths and wage theft.

The media, especially Western media, covered these issues extensively and some notable personalities boycotted the tournament. Not even a $1 million check could convince British musician Rod Stewart to be at the tournament. He declined the offer saying “It’s not right to go.”

There was no mention of Qatar without a follow-up question on human rights, safety of fans, and protection of LGBTQ+ people in the lead-up to the global Mundial. And rightly so.

The world was, and has been, vocal on these issues for years, accusing Qatar of sportswashing – a term used by Western media in reference to using investment in sport to cleanse a country’s bad image.

Hence, it is no coincidence that international investigative journalist Karim Zidan wrote that 2022, the same year Qatar hosted the World Cup, may have been “sportswashing’s biggest year” thus far. For FIFA president Gianni Infantino, though, the years of criticism of Qatar hosting the World Cup were simply a case of virtue signalling.

Infantino accused some countries of “hypocrisy” and “racism” and suggested they were just projecting themselves as being more morally upright. He also accused the West of double standards in highlighting Qatar’s human abuses.

Maybe Infantino was right because everyone seems to have lost their voices just two years before the next World Cup in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Despite America being plagued by troubling records of gun violence that continue to soar with each passing day, the Western Media appears to have gone mute.

The BBC ran a series of stories on Qatar’s poor treatment of migrant workers, alongside scathing headlines. The British national broadcaster would go on to boycott the World Cup opening ceremony, choosing to use the time to broadcast a mini-documentary detailing the treatment of migrant workers, corruption at FIFA and Qatar’s tough laws on homosexuality.

The Guardian also had a dossier on the subject – titled ‘Ten years of hurt: how the Guardian reported Qatar’s World Cup working conditions’ – which catalogued the 6,500 migrant workers who had died in Qatar since the World Cup was awarded to the country.

The Athletic and the New York Times even published a guide on Qatar’s human rights record, where fans were briefed on the kafala system and the death penalty under Sharia law for those found guilty of engaging in same-sex relationships.

Key actors of the game also called out the Arab nation, with the Australian national team leading the charge by releasing a collective statement against Qatar’s human rights record.

America, on the other hand, has been spared such high levels of scrutiny despite its appalling gun violence record. No active footballer or national team has yet publicly commented on the issue, with less than two years to the next World Cup. Qatar deservedly received criticism over its poor human rights record and America’s mass shootings deserve the same global attention, if not more, due to the thousands of lives that are lost yearly via guns.

Millions of people are expected to travel to the US for the 2026 World Cup, which will be the first time in the tournament’s history that it will feature 48 teams. Aside from going there to enjoy some great football, fans will also be expecting to move around freely and safely. Unfortunately, though, that cannot be guaranteed.

Gun violence has become a fixture in American society and, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more than 385 mass shootings across America so far in 2024 alone. In the last four years, the US has averaged over 600 mass shootings and at least two per day.

In February, there was a fatal shooting near a rally to celebrate the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, a 2026 World Cup host city. A mother of two was killed in the process, while 22 others were injured, half of whom were children below the age of six.

“If you argue against the regulation of firearms after seeing 10 people shot at a #SuperBowl parade, then get your brain checked to see if it works,” ex-American forward Taylor Twellman lamented on social media platform X. “And while you are at it, check the heart too. Disgraceful. Imagine when the World Cup is here, why would a visitor feel safe?!”

In Houston, another host city for the World Cup, a family innocently complained about a neighbour’s frequent shooting in the front yard disturbing their baby’s sleep. The said neighbour’s solution to the complaint was to shoot and kill five people. Complete madness!

Just a few miles away from the AT&T Stadium, which is widely tipped to host the World Cup final, a gunman with an AR-15 killed eight people and wounded seven more at a mall last year. In a separate incident, another gunman fatally shot five people at a medical facility near Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz Stadium, one other venue for the World Cup.

While globally, not much noise has been made about the safety concerns, several governments, including America’s allies, are already warning their citizens against travelling to the US. The United Kingdom has advised its citizens travelling to the US to be “vigilant at all times” because gun attacks could be “indiscriminate, including in places visited by foreigners, crowded areas, and transportation networks.”

Australia has told its people in the US to “learn and practise active shooter drills” while Japan and New Zealand have also warned their citizens to be wary of “domestic-based extremists” in America. The German government also highlighted how “it is easy to obtain guns” in the US and said that has led to “occasional killing sprees.”

Even Canada, who are co-hosts of the next World Cup, has advised its citizens to “familiarise yourself with how to respond to an active shooter situation.”

Amnesty International has also described the rampant gun violence in the US as a “human rights crisis.” The campaign manager for the End Gun Violence Campaign at Amnesty International USA, Ernest Coverson, accused the US government of a lack of political will to stop the menace.

“Travellers to the United States should remain cautious that the country does not adequately protect people’s right to be safe, regardless of who they might be. People in the United States cannot reasonably expect to be free from harm – a guarantee of not being shot is impossible,” Coverson said.

“Once again, it is chillingly clear that the U.S. government is unwilling to ensure protection against gun violence.”

In a country where people have been shot for merely opening the wrong door or dipping their hands in their pockets to bring out their IDs, safety concerns ahead of the World Cup are justifiable. The US knows it has a gun violence problem but the country appears divided over regulating firearms.

The situation, however, remains a ticking time bomb that could finally explode during the World Cup. There have been several high-profile incidents of gun violence, with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt at an outdoor rally in Pennsylvania in July after his shooter missed him by a whisker. If very little has been done to check gun violence in America after these incidents, then it’s increasingly looking like nothing will change by the time the World Cup kicks off.

Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy did not mince words when he declared gun violence an urgent public health crisis in June. “We’ve experienced so many mass shootings, so many incidents of gun violence in our neighbourhoods and communities, that it has really pervaded the psyche of our country,” Murthy told CNN. “It has induced fear in people about regular day-to-day activities, like going to the grocery store, going to school, going to work.”

The bottom line is, the US is not a safe country and even its allies know this, hence the travel warnings to their citizens. A country that boasts more guns than people is not a place where the World Cup should be hosted and like Qatar’s poor human rights record, America’s alarming gun violence record deserves equally critical global attention.

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