The precedents of the Olympic Games (OG) in Vancouver, in 2010, or Atlanta, in 1996, left their mark. Fines for those who begged, food distributions several kilometers away, a law for the forced displacement of the homeless… There was no question of letting the homeless spoil the image of the Olympics. Will the Paris 2024 games also be an opportunity for social cleansing, consisting of dispersing, distancing, making people on the streets invisible without offering them lasting accommodation?
This is the fear of the Le Reverse de la Medal collective, which brings together eighty associations (including Doctors of the World, Secours Catholique and Action Against Hunger). “Things are getting out of hand. Even before the end of the winter break, on March 31, we saw an increase in expulsions and police interventions in future security perimeters »assures Paul Alauzy, spokesperson for the collective and health monitoring coordinator at Médecins du monde.
On April 3, the police headquarters evacuated around a hundred undocumented people – mainly families with children – from the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in Paris. A bus had been chartered to accommodate them in a regional airlock, in Besançon. Only a minority agreed to be transferred there. Two days later, the families, who had returned, were chased away again.
“No solution proposed”
The same evenings, operations were carried out by the police to dislodge camps of isolated miners along the banks of the Seine, preventing them from taking refuge further away. In the meantime, they have left to occupy the Maison des metalworkers, in 11e borough. “We have lots of isolated situations of migrants who have been evicted recently, without any solution being offered to them”alarms Nikolaï Posner, spokesperson for Utopia 56. In Bordeaux, a slum located a few meters from the stadium where football events will take place was evacuated on March 28, the prefecture arguing that the slum was located within the security perimeter.
In Paris, the link between these operations and the Games is however difficult to establish, because expulsions from camps of exiled people are regular, recalls a recent report from the Access to Law collective. But an intensification does indeed seem to be taking place: between April 2023 and mid-March 2024, the Observatory of evictions from informal living spaces identified 33 in the capital, compared to 19 over the same period, a year earlier.
You have 70.66% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.