Workers who were evicted from their homes told Reuters, Qatar has emptied apartment buildings housing thousands of foreign workers in the same areas where visiting football fans will stay during the World Cup.
They are forcing mostly Asian and African workers to seek shelter with their beds on the sidewalk in front of one of their homes as more than a dozen buildings had been evacuated and closed by authorities.
Just before the global soccer tournament, the eviction happens as only less than four weeks are left now. This incident has attracted international attention for Qatar’s treatment of foreign workers and restrictive social laws.
Within only two hours’ notice, the residents of a house of 1,200 people in Doha’s Al Mansoura neighborhood, were asked to leave by the authorities.
City officials forced everyone out and locked the doors to the building, the residents said. Some of the men hadn’t returned in time to get their things.
“We have nowhere to go,” one man told Reuters the next day as he prepared to sleep in a second night with about ten other men, some shirtless in the autumn heat and humidity of the Gulf Arab state.
Nearby, five men loaded a mattress and small refrigerator into the back of a pickup truck. They said they had found a room in Sumaysimah, about 40 km north of Doha.
A Qatari government official said the evictions had nothing to do with the World Cup and were designed “in line with ongoing comprehensive and long-term plans to reorganize areas of Doha.”
“Since then, they have all been housed in secure and suitable accommodation,” the official said, adding that requests to leave “would have been carried out with proper notice.”
FIFA’s governing body has not responded to this matter.
