Craig Foster calls for minute’s silence before World Cup kick off

Former Australian captain Craig Foster wants the world to recognise the terrible trail of deaths that leads up to Qatar’s World Cup.

Former Australian football player Craig Foster wants a minute’s silence before the France-Australia game that kicks off our 2022 World Cup campaign. Picture: AFP

Socceroos legend Craig Foster would like to see a minute’s silence observed at Australia’s opening World Cup match next month to mark the lives lost building Qatar’s stadiums and the infrastructure necessary to host the global event.

It is estimated 6500 migrant workers – from countries such as Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and The Philippines – have died in the $300bn construction binge since Qatar was notoriously given the nod to host the world’s second-biggest sporting event.

Qatar edged out America and Australia – many held us to be favourite – for the rights to this year’s event. Subsequently, it emerged it had cheated the FIFA rules that govern world soccer.

But what bothers Foster is the loss of life and what many see as the slave-labour conditions of those who have made the World Cup possible. Not to mention Qatar’s strident homophobic stance.

Qatar – per capita the world’s fourth-richest nation – is a small Gulf country of 320,000 nationals dwarfed by a migrant worker population of about 2.3 million.

These are often unskilled young men unable to find jobs in their impoverished homelands, but keen to work and repatriate money to their families. And many women work as domestic servants in Qatar. Their stories of abuse and rape are harrowing.

The Qatari government has taken steps to improve the lives and safety of its migrant workforce, but these fall well short of adequate.

Former Socceroos captain Foster is part of the SBS commentary team for the World Cup, but won’t travel there. And he is donating his broadcast fees to charities caring for the families of dead migrant workers to cover their funeral expenses and debts – some had yet to repay the punitive “recruitment fees” to win their jobs in the first place before they were killed.

“I have a responsibility to support the game that supported me,” he told me this week. “Additionally, broadcasting the tournament allows me to elevate these issues and have a conversation about the importance of human rights.”

He is not surprised no countries have boycotted Qatar’s World Cup: “The political implications for governments with energy ties to Qatar is one significant factor, as is the vast importance attached to a World Cup for every nation involved.”

Foster is also concerned at Football Australia’s silence on the issues of sexual persecution in a nation “like Qatar, in which gay male players would be open to arrest and at a time when the brave young Australian player, Josh Cavallo, could reasonably feel his chances of representing Australia are severely compromised”, adding “the women’s World Cup could not be held due to the criminalisation of same-sex relations, which is the most basic form of discrimination of the football community”.

He is angry too few football federations hold the game accountable to its responsibilities to vulnerable communities and rely on the human rights sector to force compliance. If it can.

Dave Noonan, the powerful national secretary of our largest construction union, the CFMEU, on Friday night said his union would support Foster’s call for a minute’s silence.