MIDDLE EAST NEWS

TUPNews recently visited Doha, the capital city of Qatar, on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. I saw two camels; and more palm trees than I could count.

Doha will be a remarkable city, once it is finished. Everywhere one turns, there are magnificent billboards trumpeting the modern Qatari dwellings and offices of the future. Not unlike the scene in Back To The Future where Marty visits his neighbourhood in 1955, to find it is yet to be built.

Doha is, at present, literally half-built: for every functioning skyscraper, there is a scaffolded clone across the road. And on each scaffold, a handful of Qatari builders.

The Qatari manual labourer is a circumspect chap, with a finely tuned sense of the work/life balance. He is not afraid to bite off more than he can chew: for every sixty-story tower, there only ever seemed to be ten or twenty workers. Faced with such an immense workload, and the oppressive heat, he is careful to conserve his energy. Most of the workers TUPNews came across were, quite sensibly, taking “power” naps underneath roadside palm trees.

Such prudence may, however, be under threat from the money-grubbing Nazis at the International Olympic Committee, who have threatened to withdraw December’s Asian Games from Doha if the Qataris fail to provide some evidence of having actually built some sports facilities. The Qatari philosophy of project management – roughly translatable as “it’ll be alright on the night” – is rattling nerves in Lausanne, where IOC chiefs still shudder at the memory of Athens 2000, and are starting to crack the whip.

TUPNews, for one, would find the imposition of such harshly capitalist working practices on the noble Qatari worker an awful shame.

Joe Qatari, incidentally, is getting a little peeved at the fact that his city is now effectively a building site – no matter how great the future rewards. I can see his point. At first, the visitor is invigorated by the sheer promise and ambition of this plucky city-state. But after a while, the sense of unfinishedness becomes unnerving. As a fellow hack remarked, visiting Doha today is like “getting to a party before anyone else has arrived.”

(pics to follow)