The Journalist Fighting to Expose Qatar's World Cup Crimes

On a Friday in late March, the German television journalist Florian Bauer and a small camera crew from ARD, a German broadcaster, parked their rented vehicle in a dusty lot on the outskirts of Doha, Qatar. They'd flown in the previous evening, and this was their first shoot in the industrial area that houses the millions of South Asian guest workers the Gulf nation has brought in to build the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup. A group of Nepali workers approached the crew after only a couple minutes, eager to show them around their dorm on what was the workers' day off.

Although the dorm stood next to two new, unoccupied barracks, what the crew filmed inside the old dorm wasn't very much changed from the last time Bauer had been to Qatar, in the spring of 2014, when the World Cup 2022 Organizational Committee announced reforms and invited him to see the nation's progress: Bauer's crew filmed windowless rooms overcrowded with bunks; with no air conditioning, they were oven hot. (Temperatures in Qatar regularly exceed 115 degrees Fahrenheit.) They filmed a squalid, tiny kitchen shared by the 300-odd workers living in the dorm and a single, filthy bathroom housing toilet stalls that didn't even have doors.

When they'd finished filming the dorm, the crew thanked the workers and moved on to a new location. At their next stop, Bauer and his crew were approached by two men in plainclothes who introduced themselves as police and arrested the group. The police took Bauer and his team to a station, where, for the next 14 hours, they were interrogated. What were they doing here? Did they have permission to film? Was there an ulterior motive? When they were through, the authorities released the crew to their hotel, where they weren't allowed to leave for the next five days. Bauer and his team didn't get their equipment back for weeks, and when it was finally returned, all of the information—work-related and private data, like photos and contact details on Bauer's phone—had been deleted.

But the Qatar security agents didn't get everything.

Last week, ARD televised its latest documentary on the alleged corruption and misdeeds surrounding the planned FIFA World Cups in Qatar and Russia. The documentary, "Football For Sale," contained the footage Bauer's team shot in Qatar. Thanks to some quick thinking, they were able to load the scene they'd shot at the workers' dorm onto a thumb drive before their computers were confiscated. The thumb drive wasn't sneaked out inside a shoe or under someone's tongue.

"I actually had it in my pocket," Bauer tells me.

Because of Bauer's arrest and some of the allegations contained in the documentary, it generated worldwide press and a strong rebuke from FIFA. "The fact that ARD is a rights partner to FIFA is one thing, and does not preclude them from broadcasting critical reports," the FIFA response reads in part. "Although the fact that a public-service broadcaster allows such a bashing is nothing new, it is astonishing nonetheless. New standards in quality journalism funded by the taxpayer."

Bauer is one of Germany's most well-traveled journalists when it comes to issues of sports and politics. He's been around the world, focusing primarily on human rights issues and how they relate to sports. This was his fourth trip to Qatar. (He made his first before the World Cup was even awarded to the tiny Gulf nation, on a tip that it was a "secret favorite.") I was curious about what sort of changes he'd seen in the country over the years.

Since receiving the right to host the 2022 World Cup in 2010, Qatar has found itself under intense international scrutiny. Putting aside issues of corruption during the bid process, Qatar has been primarily criticized over how it treats its guest workers, hundreds of whom have died in the treacherous working conditions and extreme heat. Critics blame much of the poor treatment on the Kafala system, which Gulf nations use to monitor and regulate guest workers.

The Kafala system enables employers to sponsor foreign workers. (Qatar is rich in oil but not in human resources, so it must import its labor force.) The system gives great power to the sponsors, who dictate nearly everything about an employee's life, down to whether or not he can even leave the country when his work is finished. With little oversight, the system has been likened to modern slavery.

In 2014, the Qatari government, bowing to international pressure, instituted a series of reforms, which included adjusting the country's Kafala system and improving the working conditions. But actually carrying out those reforms has proved a many-sided challenge.

On the one hand, it's about infrastructure. To properly house the workers Qatar needs to build the World Cup site, it must essentially rebuild the worker camps. "I mean, when you're driving into the industrial area, it's like hundreds of thousands of buildings," says Bauer. "To really change the situation for the workers, you really need time. A million and a half workers who are living in bad conditions? That's one thing. To really build the houses—nice amenities—that's going to take years."

In Bauer's view, the Kafala system can't be fixed in the snap of a finger either, even if the will to change the system is real. Bauer says the young generation of Qatari leaders seems truly interested in reform, but "there's just not enough manpower—well-educated manpower—in the government that can actually get the reform process going really, really quickly."

The issue is more complicated still when you consider regional politics. "You've got to bear in mind this Kafala system is in all the Arab countries as well—the Gulf states. That means that Qatar, being a major player in the region, you can't just change the system overnight, because there's Saudi Arabia [ready to] step on your foot straight away. You can't change that system too dramatically, because that would affect the Kafala system in Saudi Arabia as well. So that's a point I want to make. They promised this [reform] one year ago . It was a promise that was probably leaning a little too far out of the window, I would say."

The other point for Bauer, of course, is press freedom. FIFA is a member of the International Olympic Committee, and Bauer and others believe this means FIFA should operate under the Olympic Charter, which should in turn guarantee press freedom to journalists covering FIFA events.

Bauer and his team did not have expressed permission to film. They did, however, make every effort to obtain that permission before leaving for Qatar. They tried to register with the same agencies Bauer had registered with on his previous trips. They even sent a list of their equipment and their travel itinerary to the proper Qatari authorities. When they didn't hear anything back, they decided to travel anyway.

Shooting without permits was obviously risky. But Bauer feels the arrest and the fallout was more misunderstanding than anything. He's calling on the Qatari government to drop charges against his team and return his private data. ("Of course, I know that it is highly unlikely that the intelligence service of Qatar is going to give me my data back," he says, "but 90 percent of these data are private. Fully private data.")

You could view deletion of his private data as a personal attack, but Bauer refuses to see it in those terms. "You know, a lot of reporters thought it was very personal—'there's a war going on' or something like that," Bauer says. "That's bullshit. There is no war. There is no personal thing going on. I've just done my work. And as for the arrest, the people on the site, the intelligence services, they said they were sorry for everything. Even the public prosecutor himself said, 'You know, you've pretty much done all you could to get a shooting permit. There's not very much we can actually confront you with.' I think that says a lot."

It's doubtful Qatar will lose the rights to host the World Cup. But will Qatar get it together? Bauer think there's reason to be optimistic. He's convinced the will for change is there. What Qatar is lacking is the knowhow. "For the next several years they're under the spotlight," he says. "And [the spotlight is] going to help."