For those who came in late, in early October 2020 a premature baby was found abandoned in a bathroom in Doha Airport in Qatar. The reaction of the airport authorities was to remove 13 Australian women from a Qatar Airways flight and subject 7 of them to invasive genital examinations.
This could well be considered systemic sexual assault, rather than merely serious violations of the persons of those women.
To this point in time, Qatar Airways has failed to compensate or apologise to those women, several of whom are litigating the airline for their involvement in this incident.
I note that the Qatari Government has made a public and unconvincing apology for the conduct of its minions, and insists that the matter is closed, but it has failed to address the issue of compensation, nor to formal apologise to those women.
Yet Qatar Airways, which is owned by the Qatar Government, has the temerity to be seeking to double the number of flights it offers to and from Australia.
The Transport Minister has recently claimed that the Doha Airport incident was not a motivating factor material to the decision to deny this request for further access to Australia to Qatar Airlines.
This is disappointing. Minister Catherine King had a golden opportunity to make a public stand on this issue, and to make it abundantly clear to the Qatari government and their vanity project airline that the abhorrent treatment of Australian citizens in the Doha Airport incident was unacceptable and unforgivable, and that real consequences follow from such conduct.
Instead, our elected representatives have chosen to hide behind pragmatism, when a stand on principle would have been extremely welcome to the vast majority of Australians.
Sadly, such pragmatism is not isolated to our politicians. The CEO of Flight Centre Australia, Graham Turner, spoke out last week about the decision to reject Qatar Airways’ proposal, calling it ridiculous. Obviously commercial considerations play a major role in such publicly stated opinions as his, but would it not have been commercially prudent to make public comments denouncing the conduct of the Qatari government and its airline? It would make customers feel more reassured that Flight Centre (my travel agency of choice) has their back and shares their values.
I will never fly on Qatar Airways. If the Australian government is not willing to ban them from Australia and and large travel agencies like Flight Centre are not willing to stop offering flights on that airline, then the best course of action is for individual consumers to boycott the airline.
If enough of us do so, that will remove Qatar Airways from Australia.
Lost For Words! 