Qatar sucks?

I’d heard about QatarSucks.com before, but I hadn’t read it until I stumbled onto the other day – for some reason it was temporarily unblocked.

The website is well written, funny and has some serious points to make. Nevertheless, I think it goes too far.

You can tell the website is anti-Qatar from the title: "Qatar sucks and the world needs to know about it." The website then goes on maintain that Qatar is full of racists and bigots, with the writers making clear that they hate Qatar.

First, I wonder what other countries these people have lived in. For example, QatarSucks advises people from one country not to come to Qatar. When I was living in the country mentioned, women there were forced into prostitution and in some provinces even chained to the beds. In the town I lived in one of these woman went to the police to complain about the situation. She was never seen again.

In other countries I have lived Hindus killed Muslims and Muslims killed Christians. The police, meanwhile, were too busy stopping me and other residents to extract money from us to do anything about it.

In countries not too far from Qatar police torture suspects, women are stoned to death or drowned in swimming pools for having sex outside marriage and Christian teachers have been murdered for confiscating the Koran from inattentive students. Meanwhile America, while categorising human rights abuses elsewhere in the world, imprisons and tortures people for years without trial.

My point is not that Qatar does not have some serious issues – it does. The way labour and servants here are sometimes treated here is often outrageous. Although this mistreatment does usually break Qatari laws, those laws obviously need to be better enforced. As Amnesty International has pointed out, some Qataris remain deprived of their nationality, and the blocking of QatarSucks clearly shows that censorship still exists. However, Qatar is not alone in having serious issues and, unlike many other countries, it is trying to do something about it.

Since the current Emir has come into power, the Ministry of Information has been abolished, child slavery has been stamped out, women have been allowed to drive and encouraged to take an active role in the country and expatriate workers no longer experience night time visits by police in search of vice. Couples can walk along a road hand in hand without hassle, Christians can worship freely in their own churches and in two years I have never been asked for money by a policeman.

Qatar sucks is right to attack Qatar’s inhumane and economically illogical system of sponsorship. I hate sponsorship as much as the next person, but since the newly appointed Prime Minister has compared it to slavery, I have a feeling that it is on the way out.

I’m lucky enough to meet Qataris through my work. While I find that I often disagree with them on an intellectual and cultural basis, on a personal level I have really liked the vast majority of them, and found Qataris to be warm, friendly and hospitable. It’s true, as QatarSucks points out, that bigotry and racism exists in Qatar – but then it does in every other country, too.

So while QatarSucks does have some valid points, I have to disagree with its main thesis. Qatar doesn’t suck.


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