It was around 11 p.m. on Sunday, October 29, when the light message “The other side of the medal” was projected on the facade of the building of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (COJO), in Saint-Denis (Seine- Saint-Denis), above the Paris 2024 logo and the Olympic rings. The slogan, carried by several dozen associative actors who also put up posters, aims to denounce a “social cleansing” in Ile-de-France, less than nine months before the opening of the Olympic Games.
“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”, denounce the associations on these blue, orange and red signs plastered in the area of the organizing committee and on the concrete blocks in front of its headquarters. “TOGETHER let us demand that excluded people be taken into account,” proposes a fourth poster.
“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,” wrote more than 70 organizations on Monday, including Médecins du monde or Emmaüs France in an open letter addressed to the COJO to athletes and federations.
” Negative impact “
The associations 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.
“It’s 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 in front of the Olympic committee building.
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 last 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.
A “taste”
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.
The heterogeneous organizations which support the action, ranging from the Paris Bar to the Salvation Army, via Action Against Hunger, are certain: we must expect other decrees, 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 World Cup. rugby.
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” (July 26-August 11). They are also asking to join the steering committees for the Olympic Games. Paul Alauzy defends the request: “We know the terrain and we can help things go well.”