“The other side of the coin”: this is the message projected on the night of Sunday to Monday by a collective of activists on the building of the organizing committee of the Olympic Games (Cojo) to denounce the “social cleansing” in Ile-de-France ahead of the 2024 Olympics.
The light message was projected around 11 p.m. on the facade of the Cojo in Saint-Denis, in Seine-Saint-Denis, above the Paris 2024 logo and the Olympic rings which adorn the building, around which several dozen associative actors put up posters.
“STRONGER in the security response”
“FASTER to empty Ile-de-France of precarious populations”, “HIGHER towards the exploitation of undocumented workers”, “STRONGER in the security response against people on the street”, associations denounced on these blue, orange and red signs, in reference to the Olympic slogan (“Faster, higher, stronger”). “TOGETHER let us demand that excluded people be taken into account,” proposes a fourth poster.
Fears of “forced” displacement
“The experience of mega-sporting events around the world reveals a proven risk of “social cleansing” of the streets. The latter has become the standard procedure for many host cities of the Olympic Games since the 1980s. To date, everything suggests that the 2024 Olympic Games are part of this dynamic,” more than 70 organizations wrote on Monday, grouped together within the collective “The other side of the medal”in an open letter published this Monday and intended for Cojo, athletes and federations.
Among these associations, Doctors of the World, Emmaüs France, Utopia 56, Action Against Hunger and the Human Rights League. They are particularly concerned about the dismantling of informal camps in the Paris region, the “forced” displacement of homeless people, the evacuations of immigrant workers’ homes and even bans on food distributions.
The consequences are “already here”
“It has already started very strongly,” observes Paul Alauzy, spokesperson for the NGO Médecins du monde for the Paris region. “There is a negative impact of the Olympics on people on the streets, it is this other side of the coin, this social cleaning of the streets that we want to make visible: we are talking about hundreds, even thousands of people who are being destroyed informal living spaces,” he explains.
For squats and migrant workers’ homes alone, the Schaeffer collective, signatory of the open letter, estimates at 4,100 the number of nationals of African countries who were displaced from Seine-Saint-Denis after the dismantling of their living space. For the most part, they now live on the banks of the Canal Saint-Denis, according to the organizations that help them.
Added to these are the more than 1,600 people who have been transferred over the past six months to regional accommodation “locks”, opened in April by the government to direct migrants onto the streets in Ile-de-France. France, where camp situations are recurrent and emergency accommodation is saturated.
The authorities also tried to ban food distributions in a working-class neighborhood in the north of Paris at the beginning of October, a decision ultimately overturned in court.
In short, the consequences are “already there” and these examples are only a “foretaste” of the decisions to come, anticipates Paul Alauzy. “Policies that exclude populations considered undesirable have been around for a long time. The Olympics are just an accelerator,” he believes.
Begging and sex workers soon to be targeted?
The heterogeneous organizations which support the action, ranging from the Paris Bar to the Salvation Army, are certain: we must expect other orders, in particular against begging or sex workers.
Coincidence of the calendar, a few hours before their action, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin came on Sunday to the same city of Saint-Denis to announce “tenfold” security means for the Games, compared to those mobilized for the Rugby World Cup. .
The associations call on the authorities to “guarantee continuity in the care of people in precarious and excluded situations, before, during and after the Olympic Games” which will take place from July 26 to August 11, 2024. They are also asking to join the steering committees of the Olympic Games. Paul Alauzy defends the request: “We know the terrain and we can help things go well.”
#Olympic #Games2024 #side #coin #concerns #social #cleansing #Paris #summer
