QATAR is rightly coming under close scrutiny because of the manner in which it is attempting to promote itself through sport.

The tiny Gulf state secured the 2022 World Cup amid sweeping bribery allegations and it persists in entertaining Olympic aspirations, despite recent denial of women's rights in defiance of the Olympic charter. These would have seen such a bid fail to get out of the starting blocks before 2012 when Qatari women participated in the Olympics for the first time - among the last three nations on earth to do so.

Contempt for basic human rights, from treatment of construction workers to abuse of children, was endemic in recent Qatari culture.

There are well-documented reports of scores of migrant Asian workers on slave-labour wages killed on World Cup building projects, and of child camel-jockeys dying under the hooves of their steeds.

In 1997 I went to a race meeting on the outskirts of Doha with a group of Western journalists. Boys as young as four were piloting camels in fields of more than 40, racing for owners' prize money that made Royal Ascot seem impoverished by comparison. Kids received pennies for risking their lives.

By the age of eight, despite starvation diets, most were too heavy for the job. Their education effectively non-existent, they resorted to begging. Those crippled under the animals' hooves earned more.

We Western journalists exposed the treatment of these children - often they had been sold for $100 or less to camel trainers, by impoverished parents from countries including Somalia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Camel-racing was culturally embedded, thousands of years old, with child labour so accepted that there was little attempt to deflect our inquiries or conceal the facts. The Herald, I am glad to say, was among papers which reported the plight of these children.

That assignment was to cover the first athletics grand prix on the Arabian Peninsula. We reported how the event was men-only, and that Western female spectators were spat upon and stoned by locals, scandalised and offended by the breach of custom.

I met a Scottish international athlete who worked there for an oil company. She was refused access to a track, to train: "because you are a woman". She and her husband befriended an Indian nanny who had been raped by her employer. He had retained her passport, so they helped the pregnant woman escape the country. The husband was threatened with imprisonment - avoided by payment of a substantial bribe.

I would not wish to appear an apologist for such a culture, though it's easy to criticise one of the richest-per-capita nations in the world. Yet when I returned to Doha, to lecture journalists during the 2011 Pan Arab Games, the culture had changed markedly. Despite rooted tradition, child jockeys were now banned, replaced around 2004 by robots: a remarkable example of publicity shaping world opinion and helping promote social re-engineering.

The 2011 Asian Games athletics programme featured competition for both sexes in the arena at the same time, before unsegregated spectators. The International Association of Athletics Federations has witnessed sufficient progress to award Qatar the 2019 World Athletics Championships. Journalists of both sexes attended the media seminar. The Muslim women were feisty, courteous, intelligent, and inquisitive. I felt as much educated as educator.

Yes, the country's sports teams are replete with non-Qataris whose allegiance has been purchased with petrodollars. I was refused interviews with any of the men's basketball team in 2011, because none were resident nationals. They'd have been embarrassed, I was told.

So it is still a culture which, though unthreatening, is often uncomfortably at odds with Western norms.

Demonstrably, however, it is changing. Thanks to sport.

Is this really so unsual? The Brazilian double-header of World Cup and Olympics has prompted similar stories of worker exploitation and fatalities, the juxtaposition of wealth with the poverty of the favelas. Dare we hope for education and improvement of peoples' lives?

London 2012, like most recent Olympics and the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, was promoted around regeneration. London was unique in Olympic history: no construction fatalities (two in Barcelona, one in Sydney, 14 in Athens, and 10 in Beijing).

The 1980 Moscow Olympics, at the height of the Cold War, gave a glimpse of life behind the Iron Curtain. Muscovites saw Western visitors were not ogres, and vice versa. Stories they exchanged helped amend attitudes and were surely a factor in the ultimate break-up of the Soviet Union.

The Beijing Olympics similarly lifted the Bamboo Curtain: more mutual understanding. And look no further than the global attitude to apartheid: ostracising South Africa from world sport, an ultimate demonstration of sport influencing social engineering.

If we continue to use sport to build bridges with Qatar, why should it not help do likewise with the whole Muslim world?